Many of you have likely had more than your fill of medical stories involving various disasters with COVID, monkeypox, and God-only-knows what other cursed diseases are lurking out there. Let’s change things up a bit and look at a bit of potentially good news coming out of the medical sciences. Cancer remains one of the biggest killers of human beings in the world and while many aggressive treatments and surgical methods have been developed to try to beat it, there’s really never been anything that could reliably be described as a “cure.” But that may be changing. A recent drug trial conducted at a prominent cancer center in Manhattan has produced some results that have health officials shocked and hopeful. A group of cancer patients were given a series of treatments with a new drug over a six-month period and every one of them went into remission and was declared cancer-free at the end of the trial. (NY Post)

A recent drug trial administered to a handful of cancer patients had the surprising result of wiping out the disease in every participant.

The study was conducted on 18 rectal cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan and had a 100 percent success rate, according to a paper published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr, the author of the paper, told the New York Times.

All of the patients participating in the study were far enough along in the progression of the disease that they were scheduled to either have surgery or begin chemotherapy or radiation treatments after the trial ended. But when their results came back negative, all of those procedures were canceled. Some of the earliest participants in the study have now gone for 25 months after the treatment with regular follow-up visits and none have seen a recurrence of their cancer to date.

The name of the drug is dostarlimab. It’s sold under the brand name Jemperli, and it’s attracting a lot of attention in the medical world. It’s described as being “a monoclonal antibody” and a “programmed death receptor-1 –blocker.” (I’ll confess to not knowing what that means, but it sounds pretty scary.)

The FDA granted accelerated approval to dostarlimab for testing in 2021. The side effects of the drug during the early trials were considered mild. They included fatigue /asthenia, anemia, diarrhea, and nausea. (All of which are preferable to cancer for the patients, I’m sure.)

The overall success rate reported by the FDA during the earliest trials was already impressive, but nowhere near 100%. But the pharmaceutical companies have continued to perfect the development process and this study seems to indicate that they’re really getting somewhere.

Unfortunately, Dostarlimab is not suitable for all types of cancer, but it covers quite a few of them. It’s being used to treat patients with certain types of recurrent or advanced solid tumors. Cross your fingers. If this proves to be repeatable, particularly if they can expand the approach to other forms of cancer, some of you may live to see something I never thought would happen in my lifetime.