Source: www.farmaindustria.es
The pharmaceutical industry has underway in Spain about 200 clinical trials for the research and development of new treatments against lung cancer, the fourth most common tumor in the country (after colon and rectum, prostate and breast), with almost 30,000 new cases diagnosed every year.
These clinical trials represent the majority of clinical research projects on this disease in Spain, according to data collected in the Spanish Registry of Clinical Trials (REEC), and highlight the firm commitment of the pharmaceutical industry to the search for new therapies that allow further progress in the fight against this pathology, which in 2017 (last year with official data) caused the death of 22,089 people in Spain (17,241 men and 4,848 women), which makes it the cancer with the highest mortality in the country.
In addition, lung cancer, which has celebrated its European Week these days, remains one of the tumors with the highest incidence in the world, with more than 11% of total cancer diagnoses on a global scale, and also in Spain, where almost 30,000 cases cited are registered annually, 10.6% of the total cancer diagnoses, as can be seen from the data of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM).
It should be noted that, in Spain, while mortality remains stable in men, it shows an upward trend in women in the last decade due to its later incorporation into tobacco consumption, the main cause of this disease, according to the latest data National Institute of Statistics (INE).
In any case, although historically lung cancer is one of the cancers with the most limited survival results, “thanks to the advance and the discovery of a group of genetic alterations that allow a more efficient treatment to the patient, significant progress has been made in the cure and survival to the disease ”, stand out from the Spanish Lung Cancer Group, which collaborates with Farmaindustria in the BEST Project of excellence in clinical research.
In fact, as this group of specialists emphasizes, lung cancer survival, whose rate is around 10% five years after diagnosis, has increased by 23.5% in Spain in the last decade thanks to the Targeted treatments and the combination of local and systemic treatments, since around 20% of lung tumors have alterations that can be treated with these specific drugs and that improve the results of conventional chemotherapy in terms of survival efficacy and tolerance.
In Distefar we trust that thanks to clinical trials these advances will be increasing.