Blood cancer sufferers given drugs lifeline
SUFFERERS of a deadly blood cancer have been thrown a lifeline thanks to a new NHS-approved drug that boosts survival by five months.
Victims of multiple myeloma include playwright Jack Rosenthal, husband of actress Maureen Lipman, and Jaws star Roy Scheider.
But now Imnovid – a derivative of Thalidomide, the controversial morning sickness medication that was linked to severe birth defects in the 1970s – has been shown to help the body’s own immune system cells find and fight the cancer.
Patients who have exhausted other treatment options will now have access to Imnovid tablets as the drug has been made available to patients in Scotland after it was approved by the Scottish Medicines Consortium.
The disease is an incurable form of blood cancer caused by abnormal cells in the bone marrow. It currently affects 17,500 Britons.
A diagnosis was once viewed as an imminent death sentence, but there have been great leaps in treatment over the past ten years, with new drug options both greatly increasing life expectancy and improving quality of life.
In myeloma, abnormal cancer cells divide and expand, causing a range of complications including bone damage, bone pain, fractures, kidney impairment, infections, anaemia and fatigue.
It generally affects older people – 74 per cent of those diagnosed are aged over 65.
At present, one in five myeloma patients dies within 60 days of diagnosis and fewer than half survive for five years. However, a third of parents will live for at least ten years.
The drug works by both directly targeting myeloma cells and utilising the body’s immune system to help find and fight the cancer.
It is the only available treatment for late-stage patients who have suffered three or more relapses, and who no longer have alternative drug options.
‘This is a very important drug, which improves both the control of myeloma and increases how long patients stay alive,’ said Dr Karthik Ramasamy, consultant haematologist at Oxford University. ‘A five-month increase in survival is very significant.’
Helen Watkinson, 62, a retired research nurse from Gosforth, Newcastle, was diagnosed with myeloma in 2010, after donating blood and discovering she was severely anaemic.
‘If I hadn’t been a blood donor, I might not have been diagnosed until much later,’ she said. ‘I thought I was just having a difficult menopause.’
After several rounds of different treatments and a bone marrow transplant, in 2014 Helen began taking Imnovid.
During the two-and-a-half years she was on it, she was able to enjoy a reasonable quality of life – to knit, drive, go on holidays – and not have to spend time in the hospital.
‘Being able to access Imnovid through the NHS is very good news for patients,’ she says. ‘If I hadn’t gone on to it when I did, I don’t think I’d be here now.’