Dr. Kimmie Ng, a colorectal cancer expert at Harvard Medical School, said that while the results were “remarkable” and “unprecedented,” they would need to be replicated.
The inspiration for the rectal cancer study came from a clinical trial Dr. Diaz led in 2017 that Merck, the drugmaker, funded. It involved 86 people with metastatic cancer that originated in various parts of their bodies. But the cancers all shared a gene mutation that prevented cells from repairing damage to DNA. These mutations occur in 4 percent of all cancer patients.
Patients in that trial took a Merck checkpoint inhibitor, pembrolizumab, for up to two years. Tumors shrank or stabilized in about one-third to one-half of the patients, and they lived longer. Tumors vanished in 10 percent of the trial’s participants.
That led Dr. Cercek and Dr. Diaz to ask: What would happen if the drug were used much earlier in the course of disease, before the cancer had a chance to spread?
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