hopeful data for lung, breast and ovarian cancer

CHICAGO — The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology is back in full force here, with plenaries and poster sessions as packed as before the pandemic.   

The big news from the first few days is that the AstraZeneca drug Tagrisso cuts deaths in half when given to non-small cell lung cancer patients with an EGFR mutation after surgery. That means that over five years, one more patient out of every 10 would still be alive.

Hopeful results were presented for patients with glioma, a type of brain cancer that tends to strike people in middle age. The drug vorasidenib, made by Servier, decreased the growth of grade 2 glioma tumors by 61%, meaning that it slowed the time it took tumors to be classified as progressing to 27.7 months, rather than 11.1 months for those who took a placebo.