‘Extraordinary’ survival data for lung cancer patients is seen as boost for AstraZeneca drug

CHICAGO — Giving the AstraZeneca drug Tagrisso to patients with non-small cell lung cancer who have had their tumors removed reduced the risk of death by 51%, researchers said Sunday.

Put another way, that would mean that about one in 10 patients who received the drug would live another five years. “I expected we’d see something, but I was getting a little anxious,” said Roy Herbst, the deputy director of the Yale Cancer Center and the lead author of the study. “The naysayers and funding bodies and so forth had said, ‘Where’s the survival?’ Now, with the overall survival data, it was extraordinary.”

The results of the ADAURA trial were presented here at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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