New York, June 8: An Indian origin patient was among those who had a “miracle” cure using a cancer medication that is being tried out by a research centre here achieving an unprecedented healing rate when all 14 patients in the trial had their cancers disappear.
“It’s a miracle”, Nisha Varughese said about the immunotherapy drug’s efficacy in curing her.
In the trial at the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York using dostarlimab, “rectal cancer disappeared after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy — and cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have been cancer-free for up to two years,” the MSK said.
According to researchers, this was the first time that all the patients in a cancer trial were completely healed with medication and they did not have serious side effects.
The results of the trial were disclosed over the weekend in the New England Journal of Medicine and at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
An editorial in the Journal called it “an early glimpse of a revolutionary treatment shift”.
