Getting your player ready...
CHICAGO — It’s way too soon to declare success, but an experimental drug for lung-cancer patients with a certain gene showed extraordinary promise in early testing, doctors reported at a cancer conference Saturday.
More than 90 percent of the 82 patients in a study saw their tumors shrink after two months on the drug, Pfizer Inc.’s crizotinib, researchers reported.
The drug targets a gene that promotes tumor growth and is found in about 4 percent of lung cancers, especially among younger nonsmokers. This small percentage is still a lot of people: Nearly 220,000 new cases of lung cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States alone, and it is the world’s top cancer killer.
