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Cancer Without Chemotherapy: ‘An Entirely Different World’


Yale’s Dr. When Roy Herbst started oncology nearly 25 years ago, nearly every lung cancer patient with advanced disease received chemotherapy.

With chemotherapy, “patients will definitely have one thing: side effects,” he said. But despite treatment, most tumors continued to grow and spread. Less than half of his patients would be alive a year later. The five-year survival rate was only 5 to 10 percent.

These bleak statistics barely changed until 2010, when targeted therapies began to emerge. There are currently nine such drugs for lung cancer patients, and three of them have been approved since May of this year. About a quarter of lung cancer patients can be treated with these drugs alone, and more than half of those who started treatment with a targeted drug five years ago are still alive. The five-year survival rate for patients with advanced lung cancer is now approaching 30 percent.

But Dr., a lung cancer specialist at Dana-Farber. Bruce Johnson said that for most of the drugs it eventually stopped working. At this point, many people start chemotherapy, leaving the only option left.

About five years ago, another type of lung cancer treatment was developed — immunotherapy, which uses drugs to help the immune system attack the cancer. In an unpublished study in Dana-Farber, two-thirds of patients were ineligible for targeted therapies, but half of them were eligible for immunotherapy alone and others receiving it in combination with chemotherapy.

Immunotherapy is given for two years. Lung cancer specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. With this, life expectancy has nearly doubled, Charu Aggarwal said.

Now, said Dr. Dana-Farber. Chemotherapy as the only initial treatment for lung cancer is shrinking, at least at the forefront of research, at the cancer treatment center, says David Jackman. Dr. When he reviewed data from the medical center, Jackman said he found that since 2019, only about 12 percent of patients at Dana-Farber had received chemotherapy alone. The other 21 percent had targeted therapy as their first treatment, and 85 percent of the remaining patients received immunotherapy alone or with chemotherapy.



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