Doctors say that they have successfully cured rectal cancer in patients through an experimental pharmacological study.
Oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre (MSK) in New York say that they have found that the latest tests performed on the patients showed no signs of cancer.
Treatment uses immunotherapy, which uses the body’s immune system as an ally against the cancer.
Sascha Roth, the first patient in the clinical trial to receive immunotherapy, was treated for six months.
For the first time, the MSK clinical trial examined whether immunotherapy alone could defeat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues in a subset of patients whose tumours harboured a specific genetic mutation .
As the first patient to enrol in the study, the research team feared Roth’s experiment might turn out to be an outlier, but the same startling finding was repeated for all 14 people in the study. .
In all cases, after immunotherapy, the rectal cancer disappeared, without the need for standard treatments of radiotherapy, surgery or chemotherapy, and none of the patients who had not had cancer for up to two years no longer had cancer.
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