Cancer patients may benefit from off-label drugs

A new study finds that cancer patients may benefit from drugs that are not approved for the disease. Researchers used genetic data of patients who had exhausted existing treatment options to find “off-label” drugs that may work instead. When these drugs were tested in a clinical trial, a third of the 215 patients treated saw their tumors grow smaller or remain stable in response to the treatments, for a median duration of around nine months. More than 60% of these patients received targeted genetic therapies, while the others received some form of immunotherapy. Still, two-thirds of the patients did not benefit from the treatments because they either discontinued participating in the study or, more commonly, their disease worsened. “[E]xisting anticancer drugs may have value beyond their approved indications,” the study authors write, which could expand which patients benefit from them.