Diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer three years ago, the prognosis for Ms Sin didn't look good. With cancer cells that had spread from her lungs to her brain, bones and liver, Sin (full name withheld for patient confidentiality reasons) was given three to four months to live.
But a treatment combination of chemotherapy and a relatively new drug that prevents angiogenesis - the formation of new blood vessels - managed to control the disease, relieve pain, and extend her life by more than two years. Sin, who was in her 50s, lived for 26 months before succumbing to the cancer.
The drug that helped her is bevacizumab (beh-vah-SIH-zoo-mab), which is sold under the brand name Avastin and made by Genentech, an arm of the Swiss drug maker Roche. It's designed to bind to and inhibit a protein that plays a critical role in tumour angiogenesis, and hence stop the growth and spread of cancer cells.
Large-scale clinical trials confirming the efficacy and safety of the drug in patients with advanced or recurrent non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) date to 2005. But two sub-studies on only Asian patients, published last year and revealed to local media a fortnight ago, give new hope for late-stage lung cancer patients in Hong Kong, where lung cancer is the biggest cancer killer.
The sub-studies reveal that the treatment combination of bevacizumab and chemotherapy increases the median survival time of late-stage Asian lung cancer patients to two years or more. More importantly, for reasons not yet known to scientists, Asians seem to respond better to the drug.
'We can see that bevacizumab enhanced the survival rate of Asian patients, with its efficacy on Asians perhaps outperforming that on other ethnicities,' says Dr Daniel Chua Tsin-tien, a clinical oncologist and an investigator in one of the studies.