A new drug can help prolong life for terminally ill liver cancer patients and control the disease, University of Hong Kong researchers have found. But currently it costs about HK$38,000 a month and its use on liver cancer patients is still being researched.
Since last year, the university recruited 50 advanced liver cancer patients, too ill to undergo any conventional therapy, to take the cancer drug, Sorafenib. Sixteen patients were successfully evaluated after three months of the medication but 18 patients died before they could be evaluated.
Among the 16, the tumours of two patients had been significantly reduced by more than 30 per cent while the growth of tumours in four patients was stabilised.
Ronnie Poon Tung-ping, of the university's surgery department, said most of the test patients had only had a life expectancy of less than three months.
'This drug can give them new hope and improve their condition so that they may undergo conventional therapy.' Conventional therapy includes liver resection, a liver transplant and ablation therapy.
Sorafenib has been used to treat renal cancer patients for about five years but it has been only used by liver cancer patients in the past two years.
Professor Poon explained that the drug not only suppresses the growth of cancer cells but also inhibits the growth of the blood vessels which supply nutrition to the tumours, making it more effective than the conventional cancer drugs.
