The University of Virginia Medical Center is not just one of Newsweek’s top 50 hospitals in the country (and No. 1 in the state), it is the only Level I trauma center in our area. It is also home to some of the world’s biggest medical breakthroughs. As you’ll see in the following pages, UVA is on the bleeding edge of several advancements in medicine, from treatments for one of the deadliest cancers in existence, to a potential cure for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Hope for the hopeless
For decades, a small cell lung cancer diagnosis was virtually a death sentence: It accounts for about 15 percent of all lung cancer diagnoses, but is particularly deadly because of its rapid and aggressive metastases. Because of these properties, SCLC staging is often simplified to either limited, where there are no metastases outside the chest, or extensive, where it has progressed beyond the lungs. For those with extensive SCLC, the average survival rate is two to four months without any treatment. The five-year survival rate for extensive SCLC is historically below 2 percent. With treatment using chemotherapy and immunotherapy, the average survival is just over one year. To put that in perspective, the five-year survival rate of pancreatic cancer—another notoriously deadly type of cancer—is approximately 20 percent.
A treatment that improves outcomes for patients with extensive SCLC would be a gamechanger, and that’s what the biotechnology firm Amgen has developed with the immunotherapy drug tarlatamab. It’s known as a bispecific T-cell engager, which utilizes the body’s T-cells (a type of white blood cell) to find, recognize, and attack cancer cells.
Tarlatamab is providing “statistically significant” improvements in outcomes for patients with extensive SCLC, and the UVA Medical Center is one of the only places where this treatment can be accessed…