After undergoing a physical exam, endoscopy, bioscopy, positron emission tomography -PET scans, and MRI scans, rectal cancer patients have been confirmed 100% cured of cancer when administered a drug for six months, with none of them showing any signs of the tumour at a median follow-up of one year.
According to a recently published New England Journal of Medicine, the world of oncology and researchers in the field of colorectal cancer are hailing the study saying that the development of a new drug leading to a 100% cure for the cancer patients could lead to new treatments for other cancers as well.
The drug called Dostarlimab comes with laboratory-produced molecules that act as substitute antibodies in the human body and were administered every three weeks for six months to 18 cancer patients in similar stages of their cancer during the clinical trial, though their cancer level was locally advanced in the rectum but had not spread to other organs.
Though rectal cancer is highly survivable when treated in its early stages, the most effective traditional treatments of radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery can also leave patients with permanent bowel and bladder dysfunction, sexual dysfunction, and infertility. For younger women, the treatment can cause scarring of the uterus, making them unable to carry a pregnancy; other patients with low-situated rectal tumors need to permanently use a colostomy bag after surgery.
Sascha Roth, the first patient to enter the experimental study in late 2019, knows firsthand how big a deal the results are, but said that since the news was released Sunday, she and her family are beginning to understand the broader impact.
The study does have caveats: The sample size of patients, while diverse in age, race, and ethnicity, was small. And even the earliest patients in the trial still have several more years of observation to ensure that the tumors haven’t reemerged or metastasized elsewhere in the body. The results also only pertain to those who carry a specific abnormality to their rectal cancer known as mismatch repair-deficiency, which impedes the body’s function to normalize or “repair” abnormalities when cells divide and instead results in mutations.
David Ryan, the director of clinical oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the results are a game-changer for cancer patients with mismatch-repair deficiency. The study was sponsored by biotech company Tesaro — which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline when the earliest patient began treatment in 2019.
Also speaking, Dr. Luis A. Diaz J. of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said this was “the first time this has happened in the history of cancer”.
Dr. Alan P. Venook, who is a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, said that the complete remission in every single patient is “unheard-of”. He hailed the research as a world-first. He even noted that it was especially impressive as not all of the patients suffered significant complications from the trial drug.
The oldest description of cancer (although the word cancer was not used) was discovered in Egypt and dates back to about 3000 BC. It’s called the Edwin Smith Papyrus and is a copy of part of an ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery. It describes 8 cases of tumors or ulcers of the breast that were removed by cauterization with a tool called the fire drill. The writing says about the disease, “There is no treatment.”
The origin of the word cancer is credited to the Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who is considered the “Father of Medicine.” Hippocrates used the terms carcinos and carcinoma to describe non-ulcer forming and ulcer-forming tumors. In Greek, these words refer to a crab, most likely applied to the disease because the finger-like spreading projections from cancer called to mind the shape of a crab. The Roman physician, Celsus (25 BC – 50 AD), later translated the Greek term into cancer, the Latin word for crab. Galen (130-200 AD), another Greek physician, used the word oncos (Greek for swelling) to describe tumors. Although the crab analogy of Hippocrates and Celsus is still used to describe malignant tumors, Galen’s term is now used as a part of the name for cancer specialists – oncologists
