ASCO showcased payoff for new cancer medicines: longer lives

CHICAGO —  Well, that’s a wrap. The biggest meeting in cancer research — and, really, one of the biggest annual conferences for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole — has drawn to a close. What did we learn from this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology?

Here’s one lesson: New cancer medicines, given enough time, can be shown to affect the thing patients care about most — whether they live or die. The biggest example came with results of Tagrisso in non-small cell lung cancer that is still early enough to be surgically removed. In patients with a particular genetic mutation, the drug cut the death rate in half. 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 to get excited about another new technology: CAR-T, in which a patient’s white blood cells are engineered to attack tumors. Earlier this year, one of the first children cured with this tech, Emily Whitehead, spoke at a STAT event. Now she’s 18. At ASCO, we got statistical proof that patients with B-cell lymphoma who got Yescarta, a CAR-T made by Gilead, lived longer.