(Kim Bellware/ The Washington Post) — A small drug trial is having a seismic impact in the world of oncology: After six months of an experimental treatment, tumors vanished in all 14 patients diagnosed with early stage rectal cancer who completed the study by the time it was published.
Researchers in the field of colorectal cancer are hailing the study, published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, as a groundbreaking development that could lead to new treatments for other cancers as well.
“I don’t think anyone has seen this before, where every single patient has had the tumor disappear,” said Andrea Cercek, an oncologist with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and lead author of the study. (…)