Breakthrough lung cancer drug hope

New treatment is ‘twice as effective as chemo’

A REVOLUTIONARY lung cancer drug is to be made available to Scottish patients as soon as they are diagnosed.

Trials have shown that pembrolizumab is twice as effective as chemotherapy and has fewer side-effects.

The drug – approved yesterday by the Scottish Medical Consortium – is likely to benefit around 150 sufferers of incurable lung cancer a year.

Scotland has one of the world’s highest incident rates of lung cancer, with more than 5,000 diagnosed north of the Border every year.

A study published six months ago showed 60 per cent of patients who take pembrolizumab as a ‘first-line’ treatment survive for at least two years – and many for far longer. It seems to stop tumours growing for at least ten months on average – twice as long as chemotherapy.

Pembrolizumab is among a new wave of ‘immunotherapy’ treatments, which teach the body’s immune system to attack tumours. They have transformed medicine in the past three years, with ‘jawdropping’ results, say experts.

The SMC approval means pembrolizumab can be given to NHS patients with incurable non-small cell lung cancer as a first-line treatment, so they do not have to undergo gruelling chemotherapy first.

Patients with early lung cancer whose tumours have yet to spread will be advised to have surgery or radiotherapy first. But three-quarters of lung cancer patients are not diagnosed until the cancer has spread.

For a quarter of them the drug could be the best option.

SMC chairman Dr Alan MacDonald said: ‘Pembrolizumab can give patients meaningful extra time with their families.’

Dr Marianne Nicolson, consultant medical oncologist and honorary senior lecturer to NHS Grampian, said: ‘Scotland has the third lowest survival rate for lung cancer in Europe, so there is a clear need for new treatment options for our patients.’

The announcement follows a similar decision in May by NICE, the watchdog for England and Wales, to widen the use of pembrolizumab.

Immunotherapy therapy is costly – pembrolizumab costs £91,200 a year per patient. But US manufacturer Merck, Sharp & Dohme (MSD) agreed a discounted rate with NHS chiefs.

Louise Houson, of MSD UK, said the decision represented ‘a really exciting step in the evolution of the cancer treatment landscape in Scotland’.

SCOTTISH NHS patients with aggressive blood cancer Hodgkin lymphoma can now be treated using groundbreaking drug nivolumab after it was approved by the SMC found it ‘rapidly reduces symptoms’. Dr MacDonald said: ‘Nivolumab may help some patients towards a transplant which may be curative.’

‘A really exciting step’