This is the best summary I could come up with:
The patients, who were part of a small clinical trial led by researchers from New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center, saw their tumours vanish after being treated with an experimental drug called dostarlimab.
In the trial, researchers wanted to investigate if immunotherapy alone could beat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues, the organisation said.
Inspiration for the study came from a previous trial led by Dr Diaz, which saw patients taking a drug called pembrolizumab, the New York Times reported.
That trial, which involved patients with advanced cancer that resisted standard treatment, saw participants’ tumours stabilise, shrink and even vanish.
The results have provided “what may be an early glimpse of a revolutionary treatment shift”, Dr Hanna Sanoff, an oncologist at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in the trial, wrote in an editorial accompanying the paper.
“In order to provide more information regarding which patients might benefit from immunotherapy, subsequent trials should aim for heterogeneity in age, coexisting conditions, and tumour bulk”.
The original article contains 776 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’ll believe it when I see it. We hear these stories all the time and they just mysteriously die.
That’s because cancer is a broad category of thousands of similar ‘diseases’, and the more effective cures tend to be for the rarer kinds.
I lost my aunt to it. She was only 47 years old. It’s been 5 years, and I still can’t get over it.
The paper described the results of 12 patients with rectal cancer, all of whom saw their cancer vanish after treatment with dostarlimab.
Huuuuge sample size.
For such a cancer drug that’s actually enough. These drugs are extremely specialized for their respective cancers, basically, if it works in 12 people it’s likely to work in 99,9% of patients.
