INDIA – Woman healed completely of cancer in new drug trial

The experimental new treatment trial using Dostarlimab was carried out by New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. All patients were administered Dostarlimab for six months. Following the treatment, the cancer seemed to have vanished from all patients. This is the first time that any cancer drug trial has exhibited 100 percent success rate.

Speaking to the media about her recovery, Varughese said ‘It’s a miracle’. Varughese and the other patients who were part of the trial were all in similar stages of their cancer – it was locally advanced in the rectum but had not spread to other organs. All had previously faced gruelling treatments to obliterate their cancer including painful chemotherapy, radiation and invasive surgery that could result in bowel, urinary, and even sexual dysfunction.

The 18 patients went into the trial expecting to have to go through these as the next step. However, to their surprise, no further treatment was needed. According to the results of the experiment, published in New England Journal of Medicine, every single patient was cured of cancer, which had not resurfaced in with of them for two years. The paper also noted that unlike other cancer treatments, the immunotherapy adopted by MSK did not have any significant side effects.

Recalling the day she realised that her tumour was “missing”, Varughese told the media that she was shocked when the doctor told her that cancer had indeed vanished.

The findings are now making waves in the medical world. Speaking to the media outlet, Dr Alan P. Venook, who is a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, said that the complete remission in every single patient is “unheard-of”.

He hailed the research as a world-first. He even noted that it was especially impressive as not all of the patients suffered significant complications from the trial drug.

Separately, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a co-author of the paper, oncologist Dr Andrea Cercek, described the moment patients found out they were cancer-free. “There were a lot of happy tears,” she told the New York Times.

The cancer researchers who reviewed the drug, however, have cautioned that though the treatment looks promising, a larger-scale trial is needed to see if it will work for more patients and if the cancers are truly in remission.

Dorsalimab is a monoclonal antibody drug that has already been tested and approved for treating endometriosis cancer in the UK. With its impressive performance in the US, the drug has now piqued the global medical community’s interest. While the experiment has only proved successful for treating rectal cancer so far, an editorial in the Journal in which the findings were published hailed it as a “revolutionary” step in the direction of cancer treatment