In good news for Australian skin cancer patients, a new drug to treat advanced skin cancer, or metastatic melanoma, has been shown to nearly double average survival time in a study of more than 130 patients, researchers say.
Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, with two in three Australians being diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70.
Each year more than 1850 Australians will die from skin cancer, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2010 figures.
The drug Zelboraf is made by Genentech, a US subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, and was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in August 2011, making it the first new treatment for melanoma in 13 years.
In the latest study, an intermediate phase II trial whose results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine, followed 132 patients at 13 medical sites in the United States and Australia.
Study subjects survived an average of 15.9 months, when typical survival among people whose melanoma has spread to other organs is about nine months, it said.
Senior author Antoni Ribas, a professor of haematology and oncology and researcher at University of California Los Angeles's Jonsson Cancer Centre said it was already known the drug would make the melanomas shrink in a large proportion of patients and that it worked better than chemotherapy.
''We did not know that patients taking Zelboraf were living longer until now,'' he said.
The drug can be used to treat about half of all patients with metastatic melanoma, or about 4000 patients in the United States each year, the researchers said.
Zelboraf, a twice-a-day pill, works by blocking a protein that is involved with cell growth in patients with advanced melanoma whose tumours express a certain gene mutation.
AFP/AAP
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