A team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science believe they’ve identified a treatment likely to bring about full remission for some patients.
They say an existing drug called Erbitux, used currently for cancers of the colon, neck and head, could be suitable to treat the gene mutation found in 40 percent of non-smoking lung cancer patients.
In tests on mice, they were able to “short-circuit” the switch that drives abnormal cell growth, so that tumors shrank permanently.
Critical to their research was the discovery of a biomarker – the cell’s early-warning system – which tells them which individual patients are likely to respond positively to Erbitux.
Details of their findings were published August 8 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. The team’s next step will be clinical trials to establish the treatment’s effectiveness on human patients with lung cancer.
“We have found a potential biomarker that may change the way patients with lung cancer are treated worldwide,” said study leader Prof. Yosef Yarden of the institute’s Immunology and Regenerative Biology Department.
“The new biomarker might make it possible to match some lung cancer patients with the specific medication most likely to help them.”