News / Health & Wellness
New drug found helps treat liver cancer
Doctors have reported that they have found a pill that helps improve the chances of survival in patients with liver cancer. Cancer specialists say that results from a study of 602 patients with liver cancer will change the way they will treat liver cancer.
Patients in the study either received two tablets daily of Sorafenib, or dummy pills. On average the patients who took Sorafenib survived 10.7 months and the patients that took dummy pills survived almost 8 months, which is a difference of almost 3 months.
"That may not sound like a lot of time," said Dr. Nancy Davidson from John Hopkins’ Bloomberg School Of Public Health, "this is actually a quite impressive gain, it is the first effective systemic treatment for liver cancer, which is such a huge problem internationally."
Doctors say that it is a major breakthrough in liver cancer treatment and that this kind of potential survival "has never happened."
Liver cancer is hard to treat because it doesn’t respond well with chemotherapy and many times it is diagnosed to late for surgery. Sorafenib attacks malignant cells and cuts off the supply of blood to the tumor. The drug doesn’t reduce the size of the tumor, nor does it make it disappear, it stops the growth of the tumor.
"You are not curing the disease but you are delaying the progression of the disease significantly and strikingly," said Dr. Josep Llovet.
Sorafenib is sold under the name Nexavar and is approved in the United States to treat kidney cancer. Doctors hope the drug receives approval for treatment of liver cancer.
