Patrick Forde, an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine who was not involved in the studythat before targeted treatments like Tagrisso were available, patients diagnosed with stage 1 to 3 lung cancer would typically receive chemotherapy after surgery. He estimated that the treatment would improve odds of survival by roughly five percent compared to those who did not receive chemo.
“If you go back 15 years, for this patient population we would have expected maybe a survival of 50 percent at five years,” . “But because of the advances both for stage 4 cancer, and now this advance in earlier stage cancer, we’re up to 88 percent.”Lung cancer accounts for about 1.8 million deaths per year and is the world’s leading cause of cancer death. More than 127,000 Americans die from lung cancer,