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It?s been a good week for the fight against cancer. First, a drug was found that can prevent breast cancer from occurring and, according to study in the New England Journal of Medicine published Sunday, two new drugs can prolong survival for newly diagnosed patients with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. The drugs?Yervoy from Bristol-Myers Squibb and vemurafenib from Roche Holding and Daiichi Sankyo?treat the disease in different ways. Yervoy works by strengthening the body?s immune system to fight the disease, and can extend survival by two months more than patients on standard chemotherapy. In a study of 502 patients, after three years about 21 percent of patients on Yervoy were living, as opposed to 12 percent who relied on chemotherapy alone. Meanwhile, vemurafenib blocks a genetic mutation which helps the disease grow, and in a study of 675 patients, 63 percent of them had a reduction in the risk of death after three months. There were 68,130 new cases of melanoma in the U.S. last year, with about 8,700 deaths, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Posted at 7:40 PM, Jun 5, 2011
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/2-skin-cancer-drugs-prolong-survival/research/
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