United States: Colorectal cancer is one of the most common types of cancer and is mostly diagnosed in its advanced stage; however, researchers have identified a new possible treatment that may help patients diagnosed with advanced colon cancer have a longer lifespan by trying a new trial.
More about the news
In comprehensive research studies, adding two immunotherapy drugs as part of an early-stage trial increased the median survival rate by 19.7 months. It is as compared to the median of 9.5 months found in those people who only received a specific therapy called regorafenib.
According to Dr. Zev Wainberg, the first study author, “These results pave the way for further exploration of this promising treatment approach,” as US News reported.
Wainberg is the co-director of the UCLA Health GI Oncology Program and is also a researcher at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
More about the combo drug therapy
The two immunotherapy drugs under the experimental process were etrumadenant and zimberelimab, which encourage the immune system to attack cancer cells. Both these drugs are being developed by Arcus Biosciences, which has funded the new trial.
As reported by the American Cancer Society, in 2024 alone, it is projected that 106,590 new cases of colon cancer will be recorded among people in the United States and approximately 53,010 individuals will succumb to the sickness.
Diseased causes the third highest cancer mortality rate in men as well as the fourth highest in women.
Early detection is something that constitutes the management of any cancer because once cancer has spread throughout the body, it becomes much harder to tackle.
This new trial targeted 112 patients with metastatic colorectal cancers who had before been treated with chemotherapy of the oxaliplatin and irinotecan-containing regimens.
How was the study conducted?
These patients were then divided into two groups, and each group was treated differently. Seventy-five received EZFB: One received etorumadenant/zimberelimab with a conventional chemotherapy regimen that doctors call mFOLFOX-6 plus bevacizumab, while the other 37 had regorafenib, a targeted cancer therapy.
It has been stated that regorafenib is one of the targeted cancer drugs with the classification of cancer growth blocker for cancer treatment as mentioned in Cancer Research Group. It achieves this by blocking signals that are required by cancer cells to function; it also inhibits the growth of blood vessels necessary to feed the growing cancerous cells.
In the study, the combo therapy increased overall patient survival to nearly double the amount compared to regorafenib alone and offered a much larger boost in something called “Progression-free survival”, which is the time a patient lives without their cancer advancing.
The progression-free survival with the combo treatment was 6.2 months as compared to 2.1 months in the targeted therapy only group, the researchers said.
Further results of the study
According to a UCLA News release that finally “treatment with the novel combination therapy either partially or completely shrank tumors in 17.3% of patients,” and, “For patients on regorafenib only, 2.7% had tumor shrinkage.”
It added further, “The improvement in both progression-free survival and overall survival observed with the EZFB combination represents a significant advancement in the management of refractory metastatic colorectal cancer,” Wahlberg stated.
Moreover, as Wainberg and colleagues noted, the combo treatment had “an acceptable safety profile, where the side effects are almost equivalent to those experienced by patients who got standard chemotherapy.