From the New York Times: A Japanese study has found that a drug combination rejected as a cancer treatment in the United States can add years to the lives of people with early lung cancer. Lung cancer is one of the most common and lethal types of cancer, killing 85 percent of its sufferers. Only one other drug, cisplatin, has been shown to improve survival in early stages, and it adds only months.
“This is a big surprise to American oncologists,” said Dr. Herman Kattlove of Los Angeles, medical editor for the American Cancer Society. In addition, the two-drug combination, called uracil-tegafur, or UFT, is a pill, rather than something which must be dripped into a vein, and it has few side effects, Dr. Yukito Ichinose and others at hospitals around Japan reported in The New England Journal of Medicine today.
But UFT would apparently be useful for only a small percentage of the 174,000 people with lung cancer diagnoses each year in the United States – as few as 10,000, by some estimates. It works only against adenomas, also called non-small-cell cancers, and only among patients with small tumors that have not spread out of the lung. Uracil-tegafur was not tested for lung cancer in the United States. Bristol Myers Squibb and Taiho Pharmaceutical did test it against colon cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration rejected their application for approval. It is used in Asia, Europe and Latin America.