Scientists Intrigued by Pill That Cuts Lung Cancer Deaths in Half

worldwide. As it probably goes without saying, that's a huge deal — and researchers certainly aren't taking it lightly.

"Thirty years ago, there was nothing we could do for these patients," Roy Herbst, the deputy director of Yale Cancer Center and lead author of the study, told"Fifty percent is a big deal in any disease," he added, "but certainly in a disease like lung cancer, which has typically been very resistant to therapies."

To study the potential impacts of the drug, researchers enrolled roughly 682 non-small cell lung cancer patients — non-small cell cancer being the most common form of the lung disease — from 26 countries worldwide, all aged between 30 and 86 years old. Of those hundreds of patients, 339 randomly received the AstraZeneca-made osimertinib pill, while 343 were given a placebo.

Ultimately, study results revealed that after five years, the non-placebo group observed a survival rate of 88 percent. That's a resounding success compared to the placebo group, which saw a markedly lower survival rate of 78 percent. "It is hard to convey how important this finding is and how long it's taken to get here," Nathan Pennell, an expert at the American Society of Clinical Oncology who was not involved with the study, told theImportantly, as thenotes, everyone in the trial had a mutated EFGR gene, a mutation present in roughly a quarter of lung cancer cases worldwide. It also tends to be present in lung cancer patients who have never or rarely smoked, and is also more common in women than men.

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