A simple injection under the skin could offer new hope for people with advanced head and neck cancer. In a recent trial, a drug called amivantamab shrank tumors in over a third of patients whose disease had stopped responding to standard treatments.

The findings come from the OrigAMI‑4 clinical trial, led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London. The team recently presented their results at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

External experts reviewed the data without knowing which patients got the drug to keep the results fair and confirmed that tumors shrank in 42 percent of the patients.

Treating a Tough Cancer

Researchers conducted the study with 102 people across 55 hospitals in 11 countries. All of them had head and neck cancer that kept growing after regular chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Additionally, they had a specific type of the disease that is not caused by HPV, which is usually much harder to treat.

Every patient in this group received amivantamab on its own. The drug, developed by Johnson & Johnson, works by blocking two proteins that help cancer grow and escape treatments, while helping the immune system attack the tumor.

Tumors shrank in 43 people, and for 15 of them, the tumors disappeared completely. Responses showed up usually within six weeks. On average, patients lived for 12.5 months after starting the treatment, which is encouraging for a disease with such negative outcomes.

An Easier Treatment For Everyone

Unlike many cancer treatments that require sitting with an intravenous drip, this drug is a small injection under the skin once every three weeks. This makes it much faster and easier for clinics to give to patients. Most side effects were mild or moderate, and less than 10 percent of people stopped the treatment because of them.

“These are unprecedentedly strong responses in patients whose disease has become resistant to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy. This is a group of patients for whom treatment options are extremely limited, so seeing this level of benefit is very striking,” Professor Kevin Harrington, who led the work at the ICR and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said. “The results provide very strong supportive evidence for developing amivantamab potentially earlier in relapsed or metastatic head and neck cancer and have helped underpin the launch of a phase III registrational trial, OrigAMI-5.”

“This treatment has the potential to benefit many thousands of patients each year,” Harrington added.

Professor Kristian Helin, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, London, explained that the results are promising.

“This study demonstrates how the development of new treatments through rigorous cancer research may lead to meaningful advances, even for patients with very limited treatment options. Achieving this level of tumor response and encouraging survival outcomes in such a challenging‑to‑treat group represents a significant step forward.”

Researchers are now testing the drug in a larger Phase III trial. If those results are promising, the treatment could eventually help tens of thousands of people around the world.