The patients taking crizotinib have anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) positive advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the drug targets the gene that drives this particular kind of cancer. In 119 patients, crizotinib produces some degree of shrinkage in the tumors of the majority of patients with dramatic responses in more than 60 percent of cases. The [...]
The study was published in the June issue of Cancer Prevention Research. “Erlotinib has been found to be most effective in women of Asian descent who are never smokers with bronchioalveolar carcinoma, and who tend to have activating mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor,” said Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., an Associate Scientific Director of the Samuel Waxman Cancer [...]
“It is recognized Asian patients with a common type of lung cancer, the non-small cell type, have a better survival than Caucasian patients when treated with chemotherapy,” said Dr. Ross Soo, senior consultant in the Department of Haematology-Oncology at the National University Hospital in Singapore. “What wasn’t known previously was whether this effect was seen in patients [...]