Lung drug extends life in oesophageal cancer cases
11th November 2014
By Hugo Wilcken
A subset of advanced oesophageal cancer patients live longer when given a new lung cancer drug, UK researchers say.
The treatment is the first to improve survival in advanced oesophageal cancer after the initial chemotherapy has failed, and is also the first targeted treatment to show any effectiveness in this disease.
The TRANS-COG trial involved identifying extra copies of the EGFR gene in tumour samples from nearly 300 patients who had died of oesophageal cancer.
The patients, all of whom had failed chemotherapy, had been randomised to either