DRAMATIC BREAKTHROUGHS in the treatment of leukaemia and colon cancer were outlined yesterday when the sixth international cancer conference opened at Dublin Castle.
Prof John Crown from St Vincent’s hospital, Dublin, said there had been dramatic improvements in outcomes for patients with colon cancer in recent times.
“One of the most heartening stories comes from colon cancer where we had really nothing which worked much in colon cancer for 20 years,” he said.
“We have now seen a very definite and dramatic improvement in the survival for patients, even with advanced incurable colon cancer. They are now living much longer, with the disease under better control for a longer period of time.”
The improvement in the cure rate for childhood leukaemia was highlighted by Prof Owen Smith from Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin.
He said the improvement in outcome for children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was “perhaps the single greatest achievement in all of cancer therapy in the past 50 years”. This form of leukaemia accounts for most childhood leukaemia cases.
The overall cure rate for this form of cancer has increased from 50 per cent in the mid-1970s to about 85 per cent. “This impressive improvement since the mid-1970s has been achieved not by the introduction of new chemotherapeutics,” Prof Smith said. It came from the fine-tuning of the delivery of these drugs, and their combinations, in clinical trials.
Prof Smith said the advancements that had been seen in childhood leukaemia were now being applied to teenagers and young adults with lymphoid malignancies “with impressive outcomes”.
Prof Scott Lippman, from the Anderson Cancer Centre in Texas said that one of the greatest challenges of cancer research was to detect cancer at an early stage.
“Linking this early detection to targeted tailored therapies for individual groups of patients is a new frontier in cancer medicine in terms of prevention and treatment of advanced disease,” he said.
Prof Lippman highlighted the early treatment of head and neck cancer with a new drug and said advances were also being made in lung and colorectal cancer
Prof Mark Lawler of Trinity College warned that obesity increased the risk of certain cancers. “We need to think about lifestyle changes, early detection and screening policies, and they involve education as well.”
Several speakers highlighted successes with new cancer drugs but Prof Crown expressed concern that the Health Information Quality Authority (Hiqa) would limit the access of public patients to such drug treatments.
He said he feared that Hiqa would be modelled on the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK which focused unduly on the cost of drugs. “The bureaucrats who run our health service really are trying to model as much of it as they can on the NHS, and the . . . NHS produces the worst cancer survivals of any major country in the world,” he said.
He said that the work of the Irish Clinical Oncology Research Group was “a colossal success story” as it had injected millions of euros worth of free drugs into the system. “We have given Irish patients with a broad range of different cancer types the opportunity to get access to leading edge . . . experimental therapeutics.”
The three-day conference is a collaboration with the HSE, the Irish Cancer Society, Trinity College Dublin and St James’s Hospital. Minister for Health Mary Harney will address the group today.
