New Liver Cancer Treatment: Significantly Increases Survival Rate

Liver cancer, one of the hardest types of cancer to treat, has plagued the medical and pharmaceutical world for quite some time. But recently, researchers have discovered a new drug that may significantly increase the survival rate of those patients suffering from liver cancer.

With more than 500,000 people being diagnosed with liver cancer each year, it is no wonder that doctors would want to find some way of increasing the chance of living with such a disease. In a multinational study involving 602 people with advanced liver cancer, doctors discovered a treatment that will dramatically alter the way liver cancer patients are treated.

Receiving either two sugar pills or two sorafenib pills (the cancer fighting drug) each day, patients were monitored regarding the progress of their disease. Although most of the patients in the study eventually died, the patients on sorafenib lived an average of nearly 11 months, while those on the sugar pills lived only 8 months. Even though the medicated patients only lived three months longer, the breakthrough is unprecedented in medical history regarding liver cancer. "That may not sound like a lot of time, but for liver cancer, this is actually a quite impressive gain," said Dr. Nancy Davidson of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health. "It is the first effective systemic treatment for liver cancer, which is such a huge problem internationally."

Sorafenib is doubly effective at attacking and hindering the growth of the cancer. First, it directly attacks the individual cancer cells themselves, as well as cuts off the blood flow to these cells, in effect strangling the cells to death. But it doesn't just look for those cells in the liver. In fact, it hunts down any other cancer cells that have spread throughout the body. In the study, although the tumors didn't appear to shrink or disappear, in many cases the tumors didn't grow either, leading to the implication that if the liver cancer is caught early enough, this medication can at least allow the patient to live with the cancer, since it won't be growing or spreading to other parts of the body.

In fact, the study went so well that it was stopped early in order to switch the sugar pill patients over to sorafenib. The drug, sold under the name Nexavar, is approved in dozens of countries including the United States to treat kidney cancer. The pharmaceutical companies that manufacture Nexavar hope to receive approval for liver cancer within the next few months

The reason liver cancer is so hard to treat is because it doesn't respond well to conventional chemotherapy, as well as the fact that it is too often diagnosed too late in the progression of the disease. Most of the time, patients diagnosed with the disease die within a year.

Source: Catharine Macaulay, "Study New Liver Cancer Treatment Helps Survival Rates." DentalPlans. URL: (http://www.dentalplans.com/articles/18955/)