THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, December 28, 1995 TAG: 9512280341
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
Patients who choke on cancerous throat tumors may soon get help from a new therapy approved by the government Wednesday that destroys tumor cells with simple light.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Photofrin to help clear the esophagus when patients' tumors grow so big that they cannot swallow.
The approval makes Photofrin the first of a new type of cancer treatment called photodynamic therapy, where patients get a drug to make their tumors light-sensitive. The light then kills cancer cells.
``The attractiveness of it is . . . it only makes you sick where the light hits it,'' explained FDA drug chief Dr. Robert Temple, who said photodynamic therapy also is being tested against bladder, bronchial and other tumors.
The drawback: Patients remain vulnerable to severe sunburns until the drug wears off, in about 30 days.
The American Cancer Society estimates that esophageal cancer struck 12,100 Americans in 1995 and killed 10,900 of them, slowly constricting their throats until they could not eat or even swallow their own saliva.
Standard therapy is to chip away at the tumor with a laser, Temple said. But patients whose tumors were too big for the laser to help have had nowhere to turn.
Photofrin, manufactured by Canada's QLT Phototherapeutics Inc., is a chemically modified version of a substance culled from pigs' blood called porfimer sodium.
Patients are injected with Photofrin. Several hours later, doctors thread fiber-optic cables into the esophagus and shine bright light onto the tumor. The light switches on the Photofrin, making it produce substances called free radicals that kill cells.
Photofrin wasn't studied long enough to tell if it made patients live longer, but it did give patients a higher quality of life because they could once again swallow on their own, Temple said. That benefit lasted more than 69 days for half of the patients - but QLT Phototherapeutics stopped counting then and couldn't say how soon after the study the patients' throats reclogged. Median survival time, however, was 115 days.
KEYWORDS: FDA THROAT CANCER by CNB