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In exciting news from the United Kingdom, a team of scientists have created a new medicine that could be a big win in the fight against a tough kind of cancer called mesothelioma. This disease, which grows in the lungs, usually comes from being around a harmful material called asbestos that is often used in buildings.
Promising “wonder” drug gives hope to cancer patients
Scientists at Queen Mary University London are calling their new medicine a "wonder" drug. They say it has done something pretty amazing: it has helped people with this kind of cancer live longer. In some cases, people lived more than a year longer than expected.
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The special thing about this drug, named ADI-PEG20 (or pegargiminase), is that it attacks this disease differently. It takes away the nutrients that cancer cells need to grow. What's more, it is the first drug of its kind in the last 20 years made for treating mesothelioma. All the details of this new medicine have been shared in a big medical journal called JAMA Oncology.
Why is this so important? Well, mesothelioma is known for being very tough to beat, and it's a disease that affects thousands of people all over the world. In the UK alone, about 2,700 people every year find out they have this disease. The chance of surviving it has not been great.
But there is hope with this new drug from the UK. To find out how good it really is, scientists did a big test. They worked with patients from five different countries – the US, the UK, Australia, Italy, and Taiwan. In total, 249 patients with mesothelioma took part in the test. Most of these patients were around 70 years old.
In the test, all patients got a common cancer treatment called chemotherapy every three weeks, up to six times. While half of them also got injections of the new drug ADI-PEG20, the other half got a pretend version (a placebo) for two years. The ones who got the new drug lived an average of 9.3 months, while the ones who got the pretend drug lived around 7.7 months. Also, the time before their disease got worse was a little longer if they got the new drug.
The first new mesothelioma drug in two decades
The big news here is that the new drug works with chemotherapy to help people live longer. It did not make them feel much worse than normal treatment did, which means patients could be treated without having lots of side effects.
Professor Peter Szlosarek, the scientist who led the study at Queen Mary, was really happy. He has been working on this from the very start, from doing experiments in the lab to now seeing it help people. It is like seeing a small seed grow into a big, helpful tree.
This new drug works by making arginine, which is a kind of food cancer cells like, run out in the blood. Cancer cells that cannot make their own arginine cannot grow well when it is missing. So this drug makes it hard for cancer cells to get what they need to keep going.
This is something big because it is the first time in 20 years that a new drug has been successful at treating mesothelioma by changing the way cancer eats. This could mean a lot of new chances for people with this disease, and it gives hope to others fighting tough cancers.
In short, this "wonder" drug from the UK might be a ray of hope for people with mesothelioma, as well as for science's never-ending battle against this disease.
