A small clinical trial conducted by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that every single rectal cancer patient who received an experimental immunotherapy treatment had their cancer go into remission.
One participant, Sascha Roth, was preparing to travel to Manhattan for weeks of radiation therapy when the results came in, Memorial Sloan Kettering said. That’s when doctors gave her the good news: She was now cancer-free.
These same remarkable results would be seen in 14 patients to date. The study was published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine. All of the patients had rectal cancer in a locally advanced stage, with a rare mutation called mismatch repair deficiency (MMRd).
They were given six months of treatment with an immunotherapy drug called dostarlimab, from the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which helped fund the research. Cancer vanished in every single one of them — undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans, or MRI scans, the researchers said.
According to a New York Times report, the drug costs about $11,000 per dose, The Times reports. It was administered to each patient every three weeks for six months, and it works by exposing cancer cells so the immune system can identify and destroy them.
“This new treatment is a type of immunotherapy, a treatment that blocks the ‘don’t eat me’ signal on cancer cells enabling the immune system to eliminate them,” CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus explains.
“The treatment targets a subtype of rectal cancer that has the DNA repair system not working. When this system isn’t working there are more errors in proteins and the immune system recognizes these and kills the cancer cells.”
It’s been more than six months of follow-up, and the evidence shows that the patients continue to show no signs of cancer — without the need for the standard treatments of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy — and cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have now been cancer-free for a range of six to 25 months after the trial ended.
