There is more hope than ever for people diagnosed with the deadliest cancer.
Declines in smoking and the advent of screening and newer drugs have transformed the outlook for patients with lung cancer, once considered a death sentence. Progress against the disease has propelled the drop in overall cancer deaths in the U.S. over the past three decades.
And there is more to gain. More patients can fend off the disease for months or years with targeted or immune-boosting drugs, results released this weekend at a top cancer conference showed. That includes patients with forms of the disease that are notoriously tough to treat.
“It had such an abysmal prognosis. And now we have people who are being cured who we never thought would be cured,” said Dr. Angela DeMichele, a medical oncologist at Penn Medicine.
AstraZeneca’s drug Tagrisso can contain lung cancer nearly three years longer than chemotherapy and radiation alone for some stage-three patients, one study released Sunday showed. Another found that some patients with aggressive disease survived nearly two years longer with the company’s immunotherapy drug Imfinzi, the first advance for that lung-cancer subtype in decades.
