New drug cocktail doubles treatment efficacy in some ovarian cancers
It could be a breakthrough for women with hard-to-treat malignancies
Adrug combination designed to block cancer growth has proved to be twice as effective as the best treatment available against advanced low-grade serous ovarian cancer ( LGSOC ), a rare form of the disease that usually doesn ’ t respond well to treatment .
Researchers from The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and The Institute of Cancer Research in London administered avutometinib in combination with defactinib in 29 patients with LGSOC , with 45 percent of them seeing their tumours shrink significantly — almost double the e�cacy rate of the best therapy option currently available . Response to treatment was particularly good in patients with a mutation in the KRAS gene .
“ It ’ s wonderful to see so many patients experience a meaningful response to this innovative drug combination and I ’ m so grateful to all who joined the trial , making this research possible . Low grade serous ovarian cancer does not respond well to currently approved treatments , so these results could represent a significant breakthrough in treating the disease .
“ We are hopeful this drug combination will one day become a standard of care for women with low grade serous ovarian cancer , � global lead investigator of the study Dr Susana Banerjee , Consultant Medical Oncologist and Research Lead for The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust Gynaecology Unit and Team Leader in Women ’ s Cancers at The Institute of Cancer Research , London , said in a press release .
Artificial intelligence detects pancreatic cancer early
The method might offer a screening tool for the deadly condition
An artificial intelligence ( AI ) system has managed to identify people at highest risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before the actual diagnosis by analysing their medical records , suggesting it could help speed up diagnosis of one of the deadliest malignancies in the world .
Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed at an advanced stage because there ’ s no mass screening protocol that has proved to be effective and only high-risk individuals with a family history of the disease or a genetic predisposition to it are usually screened with expensive and invasive tests . This means that most patients are diagnosed late when the disease is hard to treat and survival chances are low .
To develop a widely applicable screening tool , researchers from the Harvard Medical School and the University of Copenhagen trained the AI algorithm on the medical records of nine million patients from the US and Denmark to look for signs of pancreatic cancer . The results showed that having gallstones , anaemia , type 2 diabetes , and other gastrointestinal problems raised the risk of developing pancreatic cancer within three years .
“ One of the most important decisions clinicians face day to day is who is at high risk for a disease , and who would benefit from further testing , which can also mean more invasive and more expensive procedures that carry their own risks , � study co-senior investigator Chris Sander , faculty member in the Department of Systems Biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS , said in a press release . “ An AI tool that can zero in on those at highest risk for pancreatic cancer who stand to benefit most from further tests could go a long way toward improving clinical decision-making . �
GlobalHealthAsiaPacific . com ISSUE 3 | 2023
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