Find out how Pfizer's Xalkori treats certain late-stage lung cancers

It's taken orally twice a day.

When practising medical oncologist, Dr Leong Swan Swan, was recently thanked for her critical work in cancer treatment, she was moved and grateful, but admitted that when her supervisors at Singapore’s OncoCare Cancer Centre assigned her to treat lung cancer sufferers, she knew the going would be tough.

There is, however, some new hope for a particular category of lung cancer victims. Speaking at a recent media gathering, Leong stated that new, targeted therapies were leading to “Promising results,” a rarely-used phrase in her line of work.

Recently made available in Singapore, one such targeted therapy is Xalkori, manufactured by Pfizer. Xalkori is used to treat sufferers of late-stage, anaplastic lymphoma kinase (gene abnormality) -positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Apart from positive results, researchers have found that Xalkori - taken orally twice-daily - is not associated with the same degree of adverse side effects of traditional chemotherapy.

Traditional chemotherapy can be described as ‘scatter-gun’ in its application, and on the contrary, Xalkori continues an increasing and important trend toward directly personalising cancer treatments.

“By better understanding the underlying genetic drivers of NSCLC, such as ALK, we can select patients who are more likely to respond to treatment, which may increase the success rate of personalised therapy. Xalkori represents a paradigm shift in NSCLC treatment,” says Dr Jean Cui, lead inventor of Xalkori.

Xalkori along with other targeted, personalised treatments, form an important positive movement in the treatment of Humanity’s great scourge.