Cancer pill gave me ‘four years of extra time’. According to the BBC, Linda Kelly, 67, has advanced breast cancer which has spread to her bones and chest wall, but says a new pill has given her extra years of life and time to travel with her husband. “It does let you have a normal kind of life and you forget you have cancer,” she says of the new drug capivasertib, which has been recommended for NHS use in England and Wales, and is funded now in England.
Linda is one of more than 1,000 women with incurable breast cancer who could benefit from the drug, which can slow progression of the disease. The side-effects for her were minimal and it’s allowed her to go on holiday to New Zealand with her husband Neil last year and plan a trip to the US this year.
“You feel the drug is working and you can be a lot calmer – it’s given me nearly four years of extra time,” she says. In trials with 708 patients, when combined with hormone therapy, the drug doubled the time the cancer took to grow, from 3.6 months to 7.3 months, and shrank tumours in 23% of patients.
SWF Health & Social Care Group 