Drug hope in fight against cancer of the bladder

November 27, 2014  19:30

British scientists have made a breakthrough in treating one of Britain’s most deadly cancers.

When patients with bladder tumours that were thought to be untreatable were given a new drug, many of their tumours shrank and in some cases disappeared completely.

In some cases the cancer disappeared completely. One man is still free of the disease, a year after starting treatment, The Daily Mail reports.

Bladder cancer is Britain’s seventh most common cancer, but research into it has been largely neglected and there have been no new treatments for 30 years.

It is also one of the biggest cancer killers, with more than 5,000 deaths a year – or 14 a day.

One in ten cases are not spotted until the disease has spread from the bladder to another part of the body and these patients tend to only live for 12 to 18 months after diagnosis.

With chemotherapy having limited benefit but producing debilitating side-effects, many patients decide to forgo it in favour of making the most of their remaining months.

Others are too elderly or too ill to cope with the toxic cocktail of drugs used.

In contrast, the new drug produced ‘striking’ results and has few side-effects, the journal Nature reports.

Researcher Tom Powles, of Queen Mary University of London, said the new drug ‘revolutionised’ the lives of patients in a trial.

Many bladder tumours have a protein that switches off the immune system. The new drug, known only as MPDL3280A, turns the immune system back on – which then attacks the cancer.

In a trial at Barts Cancer Institute in London involving patients with supposedly untreatable cancer, the drug shrank tumours in more than half of those with the protein.

Surprisingly, it also helped some of the patients whose tumours didn’t have the protein, the journal Nature reports.

Dr Powles, of Queen Mary University of London, said: ‘We have had people who have been told to go away because there are not treatment options for them and the cancer has completely disappeared or reduced in size.

The drug, which has few side effects, is unlikely to be available until the ongoing trial stage is completed.

A second, larger, trial has just finished and a third is about to begin.

It shows promise for fighting a range of other cancers, including bowel and skin cancers.

However, the drugs watchdog in the US was so impressed by Dr Powles’ results that it may not wait for all the results before giving the go ahead for the drug’s use.

European authorities are likely to want all the data before approving it, meaning it is several years from the market here.

The medicine, which is given through a drip every three weeks, is being developed by Roche, the Swiss firm behind breast cancer ‘wonder drug’ Herceptin.

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