"Researchers have stopped a study of a new lung cancer drug saying its so effective they want to offer it to all the patients in the trial. The drug Keytruda is the same drug  http former president Jimmy Carter says helped stall advanced melanoma that had spread to his brain. Keytruda was being tested for the first time in  lung cancer patients who had not been treated at all yet. The researchers wanted to see how it worked against the standard chemotherapy cocktails. It worked at least as well if not better than the chemo so the researchers have stopped the study to give everyone a chance to take Keytruda Merck the company that makes the drug said. It helped patients live longer overall and helped them live longer without their tumors growing or spreading Merck said. The details are not available yet. We look forward to sharing these data with the medical community and with regulatory authorities around the world said Dr. Roger Perlmutter president of Merck Research Laboratories. Independent committees look at the details of the patients and how well they are doing in drug trials like these. It was one of these independent committees that recommended stopping the trial based on what they saw but that doesnt necessarily mean they shared the details with the company or anyone else. I suspect the findings were significant enough that this will be a practicechanging finding Dr. Pasi Janne lung cancer specialist at Harvard Medical School and the DanaFarber Cancer Institute told NBC News. Cancer research goes forward in slow steps. In tests of new drugs patients always get either the very best therapy already available or the new drug. Often they get both. Usually cancer drugs are only tested at first in patients who have tried everything else available and their cancer has come back anyway. I suspect the findings were significant enough that this will be a practicechanging finding. So its an important break for a company if its drug is the first one a patient gets and it works better than the socalled standard of care. The company now can ask the Food and Drug Administration if it will approve Keytruda to use as the first treatment a lung cancer patient tries. The FDA has given speedy approval to several new drugs in a class called checkpoint inhibitors including Keytruda. They treat cancer by stopping tumor cells from cloaking themselves against the normal healthy immune system response. They work on the principle that its not where cancer starts that matters but the genetic mutation  http causes the cancer. So a lung tumor in one patient may look like the melanoma in another. Keytruda  known generically as pembrolizumab http  targets the activity of genes called PD antiprogrammeddeathreceptor and PDL. The interaction between the two genes lets some tumors escape detection and destruction by immune system cells. PD stops immune cells from attacking normal healthy cells by mistake. Tumor cells make PDL turn on PD when immune cells approach. This trial only included patients whose tumors cells made a lot of PDL. That is only a portion of people with lung cancer   percent in one recent trial. Having seen patients benefit who failed existing therapies now doing well on these new therapies is fantastic. A rival drug BristolMyers Squibbs Opdivo works in a similar way to Keytruda and it has slightly different approval from the FDA for how it should be used. Immunotherapy is a whole new way of treating cancer including lung cancer said Janne who was not involved in the study. Having seen patients benefit who failed existing therapies now doing well on these new therapies is fantastic. Keytruda approved October last year for lung cancer and in  for melanoma is pricey  costing about  a year for a course of treatment. Its approved for use with a specific test for PDL activity. The new drugs are less toxic and more precise than standard chemotherapy. But they are not free of sideeffects. Some are severe and can damage the lung colon liver kidneys hormoneproducing glands and the brain the FDA says. Lung cancer is the top cancer killer in the U.S. Its diagnosed in more than  people a year and it killed nearly  people last year according to the National Cancer Institute"