People withadvanced cancers who try experimental treatments are helped more thanpreviously thought, according to the most comprehensive look atgovernment-sponsored tests over a decade.
These arepatients who haven’t benefited from other therapies and have few options left.
But testingnew treatments on them has been criticized by some who feel the patients aregiven false hope since previous reviews showed they only worked in about 4percent to 6 percent.
However,this latest and largest study found that about 11 percent were helped byexperimental treatment, and in some cases as many as 27 percent were betteroff.
“The numbersaren’t as bleak as they sometimes are portrayed,” said one of the researchers,Christine Grady, of the National Institutes of Health’s Department of ClinicalBioethics. “But the numbers don’t tell the whole story.”
Grady andher colleagues analyzed 460 tests with 11,935 participants, including somepreviously unpublished tests.
They weredone between 1991 and 2002 and were paid for by the NIH’s National CancerInstitute. Their review did not include tests financed by drug makers or thosedone on children. The research appears in Thursday’s New England Journal ofMedicine.
Overall,about 3 percent saw their cancers disappear and about 8 percent had asubstantial shrinkage of their tumors. Additionally, 34 percent saw some tumorshrinkage or saw their disease stabilized.
The rate ofdeaths blamed on the treatments stayed the same, about half a percent. Sideeffect information was only available for about a third of participants; about14 percent had at least one serious side effect.
In tests fora single chemotherapy drug, the overall response rate was about 5 percent,similar to rates in previous reviews.
The highestresponse rates were in tests that combined approved drugs with experimentalones or tested doses of approved drugs.
