Colon cancer: experimental drug manages to eliminate cancer in all trial patients

Dostarlimab is an experimental drug against colon cancer which has made news thanks to the promising results among the patients who participated in the clinical trial in the United States.

According to the research, the drug managed to eliminate 100% of the cancerous tumors of 12 recruited patients. It should be noted that none of them underwent radiotherapy, surgery or chemotherapy.

“This is the first time this has happened in the history of the cancer“, he pointed Luis Diaz Jr.principal investigator and medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), to The New York Times. The study was published last Sunday in the scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine.

According to Andrea Cercekan MSKCC oncologist, standard cancer treatments Colorectal cancer they are difficult to deal with due to the location of the tumor, especially due to the side effects that are managed in these cases.

Even so, if the effectiveness of this medication is confirmed in the long term and in more patients, the consequences of side effects could be avoided. It must be remembered that this is a preliminary study and with a very limited number of patients as part of the experiment.

About the drug

Dostarlimab focused on a group of rectal cancer patients who had a specific mutation in their tumors, a fact that is present in 10% of people with this type of cancer.

It is known that, six months after treatment, the 12 patients had no evidence of visible tumors.

Now the researchers will continue to monitor the response of the drug and hope that other patients will have the same result.