Zytiga Still Working After 6 Years

A drug pioneered by scientists in the UK allows prostate cancer patients to live longer and enjoy a better quality of life.

The oral drug, abiraterone, was designed by Professor Gerry Potter at the Institute of Cancer Research and has been developed through clinical trials by Professor Johann de Bono at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

It has been proven to drastically decrease pain and improve the personal well-being of prostate cancer patients.

“Prostate cancer is a pretty horrible cancer, a dehumanising disease, and this pill improves the quality of life and survival rate,” said Prof. de Bono, an honorary consultant in medical oncology at The Royal Marsden Hospital.

The drug gives hope to prostate cancer patients at the late stages of the disease when chemotherapy, surgery or other drugs would have failed. It decreases the incidence of death by about a third but, according to Prof. de Bono, it is “not just about extending survival but also about improving the quality of life”.

Officially, abiraterone can extend survival by about five months but some men live considerably longer.

“Averages are hard to quantify,” he said. “I have a patient who had been living on morphine because of the pain but when he started taking abiraterone he came off the morphine and, six and a half years later, he’s still alive and not in pain,” Prof. de Bono said.

Soon, patients will be able to take the drug even prior to chemotherapy. “Our goal is to make chemotherapy a thing of the past,” he said.

It is deemed the most common cancer in men worldwide and the second most common killer among men after lung cancer.

Patients on abiraterone – which only has minimal side effects – would need to take four pills a day.

Abiraterone is also being tested on patients with advanced breast cancer. The indications are that even children with rare inherited diseases will eventually benefit from the drug.

So is this a miracle cure?

“Please don’t hype it up. We all have to die one day,” said Prof. De Bono. “It doesn’t cure but it does improve the quality of life.”

His “primary goal” in life is to accelerate the process of drugs to move from experimental stage to treatment, which, at the moment, takes approximately 10 years.

“This is a time of great change for cancer medicine because genomic technology allows us to decipher exactly what’s driving each cancer,” he said, explaining that precision medicine allowed researchers to develop specific drugs to target the area that is being hijacked by cancer.

“It’s a question of giving the right patient the right treatment at the right time,” he said.

Because these drugs are expensive, the key challenge is funding and the medical world is trying to minimise cost failures and accelerate success. “How are we, as a society, going to afford such drugs, particularly in these stringent times?”

Prof. de Bono describes cancer as a “complicated beast” but his goal is to eventually “find a drug which cures”.

He spends half his time in the lab and half with patients, which takes its toll on him: “I am ageing very rapidly,” he joked but it is clear that he is driven by passion for his job.

He recounted that only the other day he had received an e-mail from a woman in Australia, whom he had never met. She wanted to thank him because her father had been bedridden with prostate cancer but was now even swimming.

“These true stories keep you going,” he said.