Deadly cancer quickly shrinks by 50% with ‘one-and-done’ therapy: study

An experimental therapy has given one pancreatic cancer patient hope for new life.

Thanks to a “one-and-done” treatment, the 71-year-old woman’s metastatic cancer was reduced by 50% in just one month, according to her doctors. After six month, her tumors has shrunk by nearly three-quarters.

A case study about her remarkable cancer journey was published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Kathy Wilkes, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer in 2018. She underwent eight rounds of chemotherapy and an operation to remove part of her pancreas, but her cancer continued to spread into her lungs within a year.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of the disease, with only about 11% of patients expected to survive five years after diagnosis, according to the American Cancer Society.

Desperate to find a cure, Wilkes began looking into new treatments when she came across a 2016 case study in a prestigious research journal, also published in the NEJM, that seemed promising.

The research was undertaken by a team of more than a dozens experts, including from the National Institutes of Health — following a treatment that had already helped one 50-year-old woman with colon cancer become “disease-free”.

Wilkes discovered that her cancer had the same KRAS G12D mutation that was investigated in the study — and didn’t hesitate to contact the study’s lead doctor, Eric Tran, now at the Providence Cancer Institute in Portland, Oregon.

“When I talked to my hometown oncologist and asked him what to do, he only had one answer, and that was chemotherapy. And I said, ‘That’s not my answer,’ ” Wilkes told NBC News in a report published Wednesday.

After discussing with the doctors, Wilkes was also offered the highlighted gene-editing treatment, which modifies her DNA so that it will produce immune cells that recognize and attack tumor cells. Only about 4% of pancreatic cancer patients have the mutation that responds to this treatment, though the same mutation has also been found in other cancers.

Within one month of the experimental therapy, Wilkes’ tumors had shrunk in half. After six months, the tumors had been reduced by 72%. And while she’s not yet cancer-free, her cancer has not grown since she began treatment.

“I thought, ‘That is the trial I want.’ I knew that that was the trial that was going to save me, save my life. I just had that feeling,” Wilkes said.

The Providence Cancer Institute’s Dr. Rom Leidner, co-author of the new report on Wilkes’ cancer treatment, called it a “one-and-done” measure, in NBC News’ report, that modified her cancer-fighting immune cells to grow and multiply over time.

Wilkes’ response has been encouraging, but more research is needed. Another patient with pancreatic cancer who received the same treatment at the Providence Cancer Institute did not survive.

“It was an encouraging result, but it’s certainly far from a cure,” Dr. Eric Rubin, the New England Journal of Medicine’s editor-in-chief, said in a statement to NBC News.

Doctors are now recruiting patients for a Phase 1 clinical trial to continue the research.