New Treatment that Shrinks Tumors
The experimental drug – PLX4032, which is in late stage clinical trials, is to be targeted to shrink the advanced melanoma tumors and to even make them fade away. The drug is at this moment under trial and is made by the Roche Company and privately held by Plexxickon and it aims to target the tumor cells that have registered a mutation in a gene called BRAF.
The study was made on 32 patients that were suffering from a deadly and advanced form of cancer. In two of the patients, after the treatment, the tumors went away completely, in 24 other patients they actually shrank with more than 30 percentage and in the rest it had no plausible results.
“We can see the improvement in patients and it’s happening quite rapidly, within a week or two of starting treatment,” Dr. Keith Flaherty of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said in a telephone interview. As far as the patience that register no symptoms whatsoever, there is that hope, that probably the reaction time is longer and that they will eventually react to the medicine at some point.
The conclusions were that 81% of the total number of the patients reacted to this medicine.
Just in the two cases, did the cancer stay away for at least one year, as in others it reappeared after around six months time. What they aim for, is to combine this drug with another treatment and probably can result in a better and long lasting drug, a drug that could be comparable to the AIDS cocktail
, this AIDS cocktail is aimed at maintaining the health of many people that are HIV diagnosed.
The Bristol-Myers Squibb’s experimental drug ipilimumab, is believed to be the first treatment to extend the lives of the patients that suffer from advanced melanoma. The researches showed that the results of this study were amazing and the treatment has a great impact on people that suffer from metastatic melanoma.
Anyhow a combination of the two drugs, one treating melanoma and the other killing the BRAF cells, is hoped to be more effective than the usage of them separately.11
