A New Cancer Drug Helped Almost Everyone Who Took It. Almost. Here’s What It Teaches Us

Derek Laurie was working as a tow truck driver, living in a suburb outside Rochester, New York, and supporting two small children. It was tough work. He climbed under wrecked vehicles, or swam into ponds. So he thought the pains were pulled muscles. Maybe he was drinking too much beer. He stayed in denial until the tumor was pressing against his spine and he couldn’t walk. When he finally went to an emergency room in Rochester, he was told he had stage IV cancer and a year or two to live.

“They still don’t know where it came from or why it came,” says Laurie, 28. “Nobody knows why it is. They just know it’s an ugly gene in your body that makes you die.”

His fiancée wouldn’t accept that there was no hope. They went to two other hospitals before she found a rare tumor clinic in Greenville, South Carolina. They sold their house, his snowmobiles and most of their possessions and moved into a trailer near the clinic. There, the DNA of his tumor was sequenced, and he was entered into a clinical trial for an experimental drug called larotrectinib. He felt better within a day. Within 72 hours, he no longer needed a cane. Within two weeks, he was walking around Manhattan on his monthly clinical trial visits, playing with his kids and eating like a champ.

Laurie’s experience isn’t unique. Results in the first 50 patients treated with larotrectinib are being presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the biggest gathering of cancer doctors. Of those 50 people, 38, or 76%, had clear shrinkage of their tumors. Of those, 30, or 79%, hadn’t had their tumors start growing or had new ones appear after 12 months of treatment, and are still on the drug. (Data on another five patients is also being presented, although Loxo is waiting for confirmatory scans. All five seem to have responded.)

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