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A daily pill could offer new hope to patients with a disfiguring form of skin cancer.
Tumours on the face and neck that cannot be removed using routine treatments can now be shrunk using the simple tablet.
It works by blocking the messages in cells that tell tumours to grow.
The drug, vismodegib, was licensed earlier this month and will now be available to NHS patients under the Government’s Cancer Drugs Fund, which provides patients with rapid access to new treatments.
Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer, affecting about 100,000 people a year in the UK.
Normally triggered by excessive exposure to UV radiation such as sunlight, it is easily treated using radiotherapy or surgery and rarely proves fatal.
But a small number of patients either do not spot the tumours growing, do not seek medical help, or have tumours in a position where they are hard to remove, such as near the eye.
Each year doctors see about 700 patients who have tumours so large that it would prove disfiguring to have them cut away.
For some, the cancer will also have spread to other parts of the body.
The growths often leave these patients isolated and depressed.
The drug, which has the brand name Erivedge, shrank these tumours in up to half of patients and was also shown to halt the progression of the tumours for about nine months.
Dr Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: ‘This drug is a major advance for the treatment of this disease, providing advanced basal cell carcinoma patients with a new treatment option.
‘This is great news for patients.’
Dr John Lear, consultant dermatologist at Central Manchester University Hospitals, who worked on the clinical trial of the new drug, said that it offered patients a ‘promising new outlook’.
Roche, which makes the drug, said side effects include nausea, hair loss and muscle spasms and that effect on the foetus meant it could not be given to pregnant women.
-DAILY MAIL
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