A 57-year-old woman who never smoked faced a tough diagnosis. She had stage IIIB lung cancer with a specific genetic change called ALK-rearranged. Doctors treated her with alectinib before her operation. This drug is usually taken for lung cancer that has spread, but here it was used to shrink the tumor first.
After taking the medicine, her tumor got much smaller. Imaging scans showed a big drop in the main tumor size and the lymph nodes. When surgeons removed the cancer, they found very little disease left behind. She has remained disease-free for 33 months since her operation.
She did not have serious side effects from the treatment. However, this report is about just one person. You cannot use this single story to prove the drug works for everyone. Doctors say this case offers a new way to think about surgery for this specific type of cancer. More research is needed to confirm these results for other patients.