Washington, June 4 : A study has revealed that a drug, crizotinib that targets a specific type of lung cancer has shown positive response in more than half of the people who took it.

The patients who took this drug have anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) positive advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the drug targets the gene that drives this particular kind of cancer.

In 119 patients, crizotinib had produced some degree of shrinkage in the tumors of the majority of patients with dramatic response in more than 60 percent of cases.

“The strength of crizotinib in ALK positive lung cancer was apparent when less than 20 patients were taking part in the trial. The benefit of targeting this kind of cancer with this particular drug has only been confirmed as more patients enrolled in the trial,” said D. Ross Camidge, the director of the lung cancer clinical program at University of Colorado Hospital (UCH) and the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

“This demonstrates the efficacy of new drugs can be reliably revealed even among small groups of patients when the cancers being tested are molecularly uniform,” he added.

Approximately one in 20 lung cancer patients is ALK positive. Their responses to crizotinib are dramatic and the side effects are usually mild and often improve over time.

D. Ross Camidge would be presenting the latest results from the crizotinib trial at ASCO. (ANI)