Colorectal cancer: a treatment cures 100% of patients in a study, a first – BFMTV

None of the twelve study participants with rectal cancer have tumors after treatment. “This is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” says one of the co-authors of the research. Results that “inspire great optimism.” American researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results of their work for a treatment against rectal cancer. Several months after the start of the clinical trial, the 12 patients treated with dostarlimab for six months are tumor free. “I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer” , Dr. Luis A. Diaz, co-author of the study, told the New York Times. “We’ve never seen anything work in 100% of people in cancer medicine,” writes the NPR paper Hanna Sanoff, of the University of North Carolina Cancer Center, who didn’t participated in the study, but who applauds these results. How does this treatment work? Rectal cancer “is a disease of the cells that line the inside of the rectum. It develops from an initially normal cell that transforms and multiplies in an anarchic way, until it forms a mass called a malignant tumor”, explains the e-cancer site. It is one of the colorectal cancers, the third type of “most common cancer in men and the second in women”, according to the Health Insurance. In their study, the researchers were interested in a particular type of cancer of the rectum, the one with a genetic mutation called MMrD (mismatch repair deficiency). The mutations are found “in certain genes that are involved in correcting errors made when copying DNA in a cell”, explains the American National Cancer Institute. And these mutations “can lead to cancer.” To address this abnormality, study participants took dostarlimab once every three weeks for six months. This treatment is already known, and usually used against endometrial cancer. It is part of the drugs “called immune checkpoint inhibitors”, explains Hanna Sanoff, “these are immunotherapy drugs that do not work directly attacking the cancer itself, but having a person’s immune system essentially do the work.” No trace of cancer two years laterOf the 12 patients treated with dostarlimab, none experienced clinically significant complications, writes the New York Times, but the number of participants is a little small to really realize adverse effects. The newspaper notes that with this treatment, “on average, one in five patients has some form of adverse reaction”. The study published on Sunday is the result of several months – up to two years – of monitoring participants, at the at the end of which no sign of tumor was identified in the patients, whether by digital rectal examination, biopsy or even MRI. Moreover, none required subsequent chemoradiotherapy or surgery, “and no cases of progression or recurrence were reported,” the researchers write. However, as encouraging as be these results, to be validated they must be supplemented by tests on larger cohorts of patients, to confirm the various data. In addition, “we know very little about the time required to know if a complete clinical response to dostarlimab is equivalent to a cure”, underlines for example Hannah Sanoff in an editorial on the NEJM site. She speaks, however, of a study “small but compelling”, and results that “inspire great optimism”, writing that the team of researchers provided “what could be an early glimpse of a revolutionary treatment change.”Salomé Vincendon Journalist BFMTV