13 June 2016 - When it comes to promoting new cancer therapies, hype springs eternal. But prodigious cost – up to £20,000 for a course of treatment – is what sustains the profitability of the drug companies.

The current focus, as reported in this newspaper last week, is on “precision” medicine – first identifying and then targeting the abnormal genes in cancer cells – which, it is claimed, is a major advance on the conventional blunderbuss approach of blasting the tumour with potent chemotherapy.

“The potential is huge,” said Prof Roy Herbst, of Yale University – so it is rather perplexing to learn that the clinical trials of these new drugs found that they extended the duration of survival from just three to six months.

This is par for the course. A review published last year of the 70 new cancer drugs introduced in the past decade found “a median gain in overall survival of just 2.1 months”, in marked contrast to “old-fashioned” chemotherapy that is now routinely associated with cure rates of up to 90 per cent in sensitive cancers such as lymphomas and leukaemia.

For more details, go to: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wellbeing/health-advice/doctors-diary-cancer-drugs---hope-or-hype/