Bowel cancer survival time is almost doubled
A NEW drug combination to treat bowel cancer is nearly doubling patients’ survival time.
The drugs, encorafenib and cetuximab, were approved by health watchdogs in November for the thousands of NHS patients who have aggressive tumours with a specific gene mutation called BRAF.
Average survival time for these patients is just 12 months and few treatments worked to improve that prognosis. However, the hunt for bowel cancer treatments has been particularly pressing, given the rise in cases among young adults.
Bowel cancer is Britain’s second biggest cancer killer – there are more than 42,000 new diagnoses a year, and 16,000 people die of it annually. However, survival odds have improved dramatically since the 70s, and there are more than 250,000 Britons living with the disease today.
Bowel cancer usually strikes after the age of 50, but since 2004 the bowel cancer rate in the UK’s under-40s has been rising substantially, according to research published in the journal Gut last year.
And even those without BRAF have only a 50 per cent chance of surviving more than ten years.
One BRAF bowel cancer patient to benefit is Deborah James, 38, from South London, host of BBC’s You, Me And The Big C podcast. Deborah, who blogs under the name Bowel Babe, was diagnosed in 2016. Although her cancer is incurable, she’s been on the combination therapy for the past 18 months as part of a medical trial. She has twice been told she is cancer free.
‘It’s the kind of miracle drug that gives people like me more time. More time with our husbands, kids, family and friends,’ says the mother-of-two, who had some small lesions surgically removed earlier this month after the disease ‘reawakened’.
Speaking ahead of the op to remove a small cancerous node in her chest, she said: ‘Everything else is in a positive place. I don’t have any other signs of cancer in my body. My cancer is stable - and that’s because of these drugs.’