ASCO Demonstrated Payoff for New Cancer Drugs: Longer Lives

CHICAGO — Well, that’s a fact. The largest meeting in cancer research – and in fact one of the largest annual conferences for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole – has come to an end. What did we learn from this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology?

Here’s a lesson: New cancer drugs, given enough time, can have an effect on what patients care about most — whether they live or die. The biggest example came with Tagrisso’s results in non-small cell lung cancer that is still early enough to be surgically removed. In patients with a certain genetic mutation, the drug halved the death rate. And that was the result of a decade and a half of work by researchers at the drug’s maker. STAT had the story of Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca’s head of cancer research, and her role in making that happen.

About a decade ago, researchers started getting excited about another new technology: CAR-T, which manipulates a patient’s white blood cells to attack tumors. Earlier this year, one of the first children to be cured with this technology, Emily Whitehead, spoke at a STAT event. Now she is 18. At ASCO, we have statistical evidence that patients with B-cell lymphoma who received Yescarta, a CAR-T made by Gilead, lived longer.