Chinese lung cancer medicine increases patients' survival rate

Chinese doctors have reported a milestone in domestically made innovative medicine, announcing that a combination of Chinese-developed drugs has been found to be more effective for a certain type of lung cancer than the current international standard treatment.

Cancer patients treated with the combination therapy experienced a median progression-free survival increase of 3.9 months compared with those receiving the globally recognized drug Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab — reaching 11 months in total, with a 30 percent reduction in disease progression and death risk, according to the research team. Pembrolizumab has long been the standard first-line treatment for PD-L1-positive advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients, with a median progression-free survival of about six months.

Professor Han Baohui of Shanghai Chest Hospital Affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University presented the findings on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world's largest and most authoritative clinical oncology conference.