Scientists hail ‘new era’ in fight against cancer

Scientists at Cancer Research UK, who have spearheaded the "genetic revolution" in cancer treatment, will be given access to the drugs libraries of the pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and Pfizer from July this year.

The trials, which will seek new treatments for patients at advanced stages of incurable lung cancer, are among the first of their kind in the world. Initially, they will test the effectiveness of 14 drugs against 21 genetic abnormalities identified in the tumours of several hundred people.

However, it is hoped that drugs which work against the different genetic varieties of every type of cancer may one day be discovered in this way. Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, said the trials marked the beginning of "a very exciting time" in the fight against cancer. "We've been talking for a long while now about how the genetic revolution was going to impact cancer care and we’re really starting to bring these things together now.”

Over the past decade, new technologies have allowed scientists for the first time to perform detailed genetic analyses of cancer tumours, revealing the molecular changes that take place when healthy cells turn into cancer cells.

Scientists have identified a wide range of abnormalities, and cancers previously thought of as one condition have now been revealed to have particular genetic variants in different patients – opening up the potential for more targeted drug treatments, known as stratified medicines.

In the trials, small groups of patients will be identified who are likely to benefit from a certain drug. Up to 12 molecules developed by AstraZeneca will be included and two from Pfizer, but it is hoped that other pharmaceutical companies will open up their drugs libraries to cancer trials in the coming years.

Dr Harpal Kumar, Cancer Research UK’s chief executive, said the trials would “re-write the rulebook”.

“We’re talking about giving a number of options to patients who otherwise would have exhausted their treatment options,” he said. “[This] shifts the emphasis of designing a trial around a single drug to designing a trial that selects from a range of drugs, for a specific patient.”

Lung cancer is the biggest cancer killer in the UK for men and the second-biggest for women. There are 42,000 diagnoses and 35,000 deaths from the disease every year. Globally it kills 1.6 million people a year and while rates are declining in men, women have become more susceptible because of changes in patterns of smoking. Dr Kumar said survival rates for the disease had remained low, making it a good candidate for these first clinical applications of scientists’ new genetic understanding of cancer.

Menelas Pangalos, executive vice-president of innovative medicines and early development at AstraZeneca, said it was “not beyond the realms of possibility” that targeted cancer drugs could, within a decade, dramatically lengthen survival times for patients with certain types of tumour.

“One of the challenges we have is how to get these targeted molecules to the right patients in a cost-effective and time-effective way … [Over the next decade] we could start to offer patients a sequence of therapies that could prolong their life and make this more of a chronic illness, rather than an illness that is fatal within months,” he said.

Professor Johnson said analysing the “molecular landscape” of cancer patients’ tumours from the moment of diagnosis could become the norm, allowing doctors to prescribe treatments aimed at the specific genetic characteristics of their cancers.

Patients from 18 Cancer Research UK centres, attached to NHS hospitals, will take part in the initial trial, which has been hailed as “ground-breaking by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt.