A Taiwanese medical team has identified a combined treatment for patients with advanced lung adenocarcinoma, which is caused by the genetic mutation of a specific protein and has been the leading cause of death in Taiwan for the past seven years.
Lung adenocarcinoma accounts for about half of all lung cancers, and half of those involve the mutant epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), the team said in an interview on Tuesday.
For about 70 percent of such patients, the cancer will spread to their brain, significantly affecting their quality of life, the team said.
While standard treatment for lung adenocarcinoma is targeted therapy using drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors, the body often develops a resistance to them in about eight months, making follow-up treatment more difficult, said Lee Kang-yun (李岡遠), dean of the Office of Human Research at Taipei Medical University.
Lee, who is also a thoracic specialist, said the team tried a treatment combining tyrosine kinase inhibitors and an anti-angiogenic therapy using the drug bevacizumab in a clinical trial involving 55 people with stage four EGFR-mutated lung adenocarcinoma.
Patients who received the combined treatment were able to use tyrosine kinase inhibitors for 23 months without developing a drug resistance, Lee said, adding that the combined treatment can extend drug function from 13 months to 50 months.
Moreover, the combined treatment has been proven to protect against brain metastasis, Lee said.
Eighty-three percent of the subjects were able to keep their tumor under control, compared with an intracranial control rate of only 43 percent for patients who received traditional treatment.
Lee said that the mechanism for the new treatment involves using anti-angiogenic therapy to manage the “micro-environment” around the tumor, curbing the proliferation of veins that provide it with nutrients.
The research team’s findings were first published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology in November last year.
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