Scientists at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) say a new drug, AFM24, could stop the growth of one in three cancer tumors.
The immunotherapy drug worked in patients suffering from advanced disease who otherwise weren’t responding to treatments, according to The Telegraph. Those patients had various cancers including bowel, lung and pancreatic, and were mostly enrolled in the phase one trial for AFM24 as a “last resort” treatment option.
“The immunotherapy drug, called AFM24, was shown to work in patients with advanced disease that had stopped responding to treatment, including bowel, lung and pancreatic cancers.”https://t.co/AeyMN5FhmD
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Researchers at the ICR and Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, who conducted the trial, said they were “excited” about the results for the “highly innovative” treatment, according to The Telegraph.
AFM24 sends the body’s own immune cells to kill tumors. In the trial of 24 patients, eight saw their cancerous tumors stop growing after treatment with AFM24. Three of them saw their tumors actually shrink or stop growing for three or more months. (RELATED: The FDA’s Own Experts Have No Idea Why It Approved Another COVID Booster Dose)
Chief executive of the ICR, Professor Kristian Hellin, said at the American Association for Cancer Research conference over the weekend in New Orleans that the treatment presents a new alternative in cell therapy that shows great promise: “This new treatment is highly innovative because it finds a way to direct natural killer cells within the immune system to tumors without requiring complex and expensive re-engineering of a patient’s own cells.”
“So far, we’ve only seen initial findings in a small group of patients, but the results look promising, and we’re optimistic that this could be a new type of immunotherapy for cancers that are otherwise hard to treat.”