One pill a day can cut lung cancer deaths by a significant margin

Lung cancer just got a lot less scary thanks to a once-daily pill that's now been proven to cut deaths by a huge margin among patients in the early stages of the disease that have undergone surgery according to the result of a new multi-year study. 

Osimertinib is a drug that was developed by AstraZeneca and is currently sold by the company under the Tagrisso. It is part of a class of medications called kinase inhibitors according to Medical Plus and works by blocking the signals that help cancer cells grow. 

The drug has been approved for medical use in the United States and European Union for several years but doctors haven't had the sort of concrete evidence they needed to definitely prove osimertinib was an extremely effective treatment for post-op lung cancer patients. 

However, all of that has changed with the results from a multi-year international study that found the drug was extremely good at saving lives. How good? Well, the results were about “twice as good” as the study’s lead author Dr. Roy Herst had expected. 

The study looked at 682 patients from all across the world who were suffering from lung cancer with roughly half of the group given Tagrisso once daily for three years while the other half was given a placebo, and the results for those on the drug were stunning. 

Within the first five years of being diagnosed, 88% of the people taking Tagrisso were still alive while the placebo group only had 78% of participants still living. Researchers found that the overall risk of death was lowered when on the drug by a staggering 51%. 

“Thirty years ago, there was nothing we could do for these patients,” Dr. Herst, who is the Deputy Director of the Yale Center, said according to a report from The Guardian. 

“Fifty percent is a big deal in any disease, but certainly in a disease like lung cancer, which has typically been very resistant to therapies,” Dr. Herst added. 

NBC News noted that President Joe Biden and his administration set a “moonshot goal” of reducing the cancer death rate in the country by at least 50% over 25 years, and Dr. Herst explained that, at least in the case of lung cancer, researchers “hit the mark.”

Participants in what has been titled the ADAURA study hailed from Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East, and the United States with AstraZeneca funding the cost of the study to help better understand the effects Targrisso could have globally. 

Targrisso is currently approved for use in over 100 countries and the new evidence of its usefulness could see even more countries adopt the drug to treat lung cancer patients.

"We already knew that this drug was effective. However, what we are seeing now is that patients will also live longer,” Dr. Charu Aggarwal explained to NBC News. Aggarwal is an associate professor at the University of Philadelphia and wasn’t involved in the study. 

Participants in the study included individuals in the first three stages of non-small lung cancer according to NBC News, which it noted was the most common type of cancer that affected the lungs, and they also suffered from a mutation in their EGFR receptors. 

The EGFR receptor normally controls cell growth but NBC News noted that a mutation in some people can make their cells grow and divide at an excessive rate, which causes cancer in some. Dr. Herst explained the drug he studied works by turning that mutated receptor off.

Patrick Forde is an associate professor at John Hopkins Medicine and he spoke to NBC News about what survival rates were like for patients with lung cancer before there were targeted treatments like Targrisso available to those after their surgeries. 

Forde explained that individuals would usually undergo chemotherapy which would only increase their survival rate by about 5% compared to people who opted not to subject themselves to the rigors of chemo and the potential dangers that came with it. 

"If you go back 15 years, for this patient population we would have expected maybe a survival of 50% at five years," Forde said. "But because of the advances both for stage 4 cancer, and now this advance in earlier stage cancer, we're up to 88%," which is a wonderful prospect and comment on just how far we've come.