Lung cancer drug sees positive early results

A clinical trial into the effects of a new drug for lung cancer patients is showing good results so far. The drug, which has been designed to make the immune system seek out and attack cancerous cells, is delivering positive results among patients. Patients that are, or were smokers seem to be displaying the most promising results after being treated with MPDL3280A.

The early stage results from the 85 patients participating in the non-small cell lung cancer clinical trial have been quite positive. Results show that MPDL3280A is able to produce lasting responses from patients that have previously shown no positive improvement following chemotherapy treatment, according to Professor Jean-Charles Soria, director of the Site de Recherche Integree sur le Cancer (SIRIC). 

Professor Soria said to the 2013 European Cancer Congress: "This is the first study to suggest a potential relationship between smoking history and response to inhibiting the PD-L1/PD-1 pathway - a pathway that is instrumental in enabling cancer cells to escape detection by the immune system."

So far, of the current or previous smokers taking part in the clinical trial, 26 per cent of them have responded positively to treatment, in comparison to the ten per cent of patients that have never smoked. This, said Professor Soria, is positive news in terms of lung cancer treatment, as the majority of patients are, or at one point were, smokers. 

The positive results garnered from the Phase One trial so far show a positive trend. Lung cancer is a difficult disease to treat and becomes incurable once it has begun to spread to other areas of the body. 

MPDL3280A functions by blocking the programmed death one protein (PD-1) interacting with the immune system. This protein works to stop the immune system from killing the cancerous cells, which allows them to spread and make the cancer incurable. However, by blocking this interaction, MPDL3280A helps to boost the patient's immune response to the cancerous cells.

The current clinical trial sees enrolled patients receiving the intravenous form of the drug every three weeks in order to assess its safety and functionality.