Doctors are reporting success with newer drugs that control certain types of cancer better, reduce the risk it will come back and make treatment simpler and easier to bear.
Gentler drugs would be a relief to patients like Jenn Carroll, a 57-year-old human resources director from New Hartford, Connecticut, who had traditional IV chemotherapy after lung cancer surgery in 2018.Carroll jumped at the chance to help test a newer drug taken as a daily pill, AstraZeneca's Tagrisso. Rather than chemo's imprecise cell-killing approach, Tagrisso targets a specific gene mutation.
About half had standard chemo after surgery and then took Tagrisso or placebo pills. Independent monitors stopped the study last month when the drug's benefit seemed clear. Researchers tested Myovant Sciences's relugolix -- a different type of hormone blocker and the first that's a daily pill -- versus leuprolide shots every three months in 930 men treated for nearly a year.
That could be important because heart disease is a frequent cause of death in men with prostate cancer, according to Dr. Celestia Higano of the University of Washington in Seattle. She had no role in the study and wrote in a commentary published with the results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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