Cheap anti-malaria drug shows promise against colorectal cancer
A Randomised, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study of Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer
Medical experts say a common malaria drug could have a significant impact on colorectal cancer providing a cheap adjunct to current expensive chemotherapy
November 18 2014
Cheap anti-malaria drug shows promise against colorectal cancer
"The survival beyond 2 years in the artesunate group was estimated at 91% whilst surviving the first recurrence of cancer in the placebo group was only 57%."
Fig. 4.
Survival recurrence curves predicted by Cox
proportional hazards model. Patient CRC21 was assumed to be missing
completely at random (please see Supplementary Table 1 for a full
sensitivity analysis). In the placebo group 2 patients died within a
year (108, 170) days leaving 10 (83%) in the study, another 2 within the
next year (383, 663 days) leaving 8 (66%) in the study and the other
two died within the third year of the follow up (749 and 990,
respectively) leaving 50% patients beyond the third year. The only death
in the artesunate group happened after 552 days leaving 9 patients
(90%) surviving beyond the third year. These crude estimates support the
estimates from the data above.
A Randomised, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study of Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer
