Carl Walsh says the drug allowed him to live a normal life again (Image: Carl Walsh)
When his tongue cancer was at its worst, Carl Walsh lived on a diet of soup, rice pudding, tinned ravioli and “many, many omelettes”. He supplemented the soft food diet with three prescribed nutritional milk drinks a day. The 56-year-old said: “I struggled to speak properly and found eating difficult because of the swelling and pain. I lost quite a bit of weight.”
Carl was one of 102 people with head and neck cancer who joined a study of a promising triple action cancer jab at The Royal Marsden hospital in London. Researchers have now hailed “unprecedented” results, which found the injection caused some patients’ tumours to entirely disappear.
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The drug, amivantamab, is administered every three weeks. It shuts down a key protein called EGFR that helps cancers grow and blocks a second pathway called MET that tumour cells use to escape treatment. The drug also helps to activate the immune system to attack.
Carl, from Birmingham, said: “I was initially treated with both chemotherapy and immunotherapy, which unfortunately were not successful. At that point, I was recommended for the OrigAMI-4 trial.
“After only two cycles of the treatment my diet started to return to normal and I was eating a full diet after six months.
“The thing I enjoyed most was the first big steak. My speech is completely back to normal and at work I speak regularly on headsets without problems.”
Carl is now on his seventeenth treatment cycle. He added: “I now feel able to live a normal life. Since beginning treatment, the swelling has reduced significantly, and my pain levels have improved considerably.”
The trial, led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (ICR), ran across 55 hospitals in 11 countries.
It involved patients whose cancer had continued to grow despite immunotherapy and chemotherapy, and was not linked to HPV. These patients respond less well to standard treatments.
Some 42% of patients on amivantamab, or 43 people, saw their tumours shrink. Fifteen of those people saw their tumours melt away completely.
Those on the drug lived for an average of 12.5 months after starting the injections, despite usually having a very poor prognosis once standard treatments stop working.
Carl was able to enjoy juicy steaks again after the treatment (Image: Getty)
Professor Kevin Harrington, an expert in biological cancer therapies at The ICR and consultant at The Royal Marsden, said: “These are unprecedentedly strong responses in patients whose disease has become resistant to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
“This is a group of patients for whom treatment options are extremely limited, so seeing this level of benefit is very striking. This treatment has the potential to benefit many thousands of patients [in the UK and Europe] each year.”
Around 12,800 people are diagnosed with head and neck cancer every year in the UK.
Amivantamab has already been approved on the NHS for some patients with non-small-cell lung cancer. The drug, developed by Johnson & Johnson, is now being evaluated in around 60 clinical trials worldwide, primarily for lung cancer, but also for colorectal, brain and gastric cancers.
ICR chief executive Professor Kristian Helin said: “This study demonstrates how the development of new treatments through rigorous cancer research may lead to meaningful advances, even for patients with very limited treatment options.
“Achieving this level of tumour response and encouraging survival outcomes in such a challenging‑to‑treat group represents a significant step forward.”
The findings were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago.
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
