Better Health

 Cancer is one of the most widespread diseases on earth. Fortunately, there has been a lot of progress to treat it.

Every year, doctors from around the world gather in Chicago, United States, to share information about the latest diagnoses and treatments.

At the 2022 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the new advances presented provide more hope for the medical community.

According to experts, the knowledge related to treatment also provides a change of perspective to combat several types of tumors.

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Here are some of the new treatments and what they mean for the world of health.

1. Breast cancer: a drug that benefits more people

Trastuzumab, an intravenous medication, has been used to treat breast cancer for decades.

The drug worked well, but had one limitation: it could only be prescribed to patients who had the HER2 gene.

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HER2 (human epidermal growth factor) is a type of protein-producing gene or HER2 receptor, which helps control the growth and repair of breast cells.

If the protein production is high and there is an excess, that is what can encourage cancer to grow and metastasize more quickly.

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A new compound, trastuzumab deruxtecan, could bring about a change.

"We are seeing the emergence of a revolutionary drug," said oncologist Romualdo Barroso, research coordinator at the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital in Brasilia.

Medicine is like a Trojan horse, Barroso said. That is, the drug enters the body as if it were something, but in reality it works in another way.

On the one hand, trastuzumab is a monoclonal antibody that, in the case of breast cancer, binds to receptors found on the surface of cancer cells.

The drug "attracts" the immune system, which sees the cancer as a threat and begins to fight it.

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Then, deruxtecan begins to attack the diseased cells. This is the second effect of the drug trastuzumab deruxtecan. These chemotherapy drugs destroy tumors from the inside out.

The novelty that this drug brings is not only in how it works, but also in how well it works, even in patients who have the underdeveloped HER2 gene. Barroso estimates that nearly 7 out of 10 patients can benefit from it.

Trastuzumab deruxtecan is administered into a vein every 21 days and is still awaiting approval for use in hospitals by regulatory agencies.

In principle, the drug can be used when the first treatment options fail and there is metastasis. According to Barroso, most likely over time, the drug will also become an option for the treatment of early-stage tumors.

2. Cancer of the rectum: a cure with extraordinary results (even for doctors)

Imagine, there is a drug that can eliminate the disease in all patients.

This is what happened in testing dostarlimab, which is used to treat rectal cancer, when a preliminary study was conducted to see if the drug was working.

This drug, which is already used for other tumors, stimulates the immune system to attack them.

In the testing phase, there were 12 patients treated with dostarlimab. The researchers followed their development for the next six months.

In the end, no one had any evidence of a tumor in the body. These drugs prevent patients from switching to more aggressive treatments, such as surgery, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy.

"Even to doctors, this is a total shock," said oncologist Rachel Riechelmann, director of the Department of Clinical Oncology at A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in So Paulo.

Apart from these findings, several things should be taken into consideration.

First, that six months of observation, of patients in the testing phase, is a short time. "Maybe the disease could reappear a few years later," Riechelmann said.

Second, the drug only works in patients who have tumors with "microsatellite instability" (MSI-H). About 1% of cases of rectal cancer meet these criteria.

This drug is not yet approved for use, but research continues.

3. Colorectal cancer (cancer of the colon and rectum): a test that prevents unnecessary chemotherapy

Another novelty from the congress was presented by a team of researchers from Australia, who sought to provide new knowledge about the number of interventions a patient must undergo.

They have studied a method known as a "liquid biopsy," in which fragments of tumor DNA that appear in the blood stream