According to a new study, the lung cancer pill Iressa works as well as chemotherapy as second-line treatment for this type of cancer.

The research compared the results in survival outcomes of patients who took the daily pill Iressa and those who took Taxotere, an IV-chemotherapy drug that’s administered every three weeks. The study included more than 1,400 participants who had completed a first course of standard chemotherapy.

Participants who got the daily pill made by AstraZeneca had an average survival of 7.6 months, and 32 percent survived one year, compared with patients getting the chemotherapy drug Taxotere; they had an average survival of eight months and 34 percent of patients survived one year.

“Chemotherapy will never be eliminated, but we are getting more options for targeted therapy; and people can live as normal a life as they can bearing the weight of lung cancer,” Dr. Edward Kim, an assistant professor at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said.

The results of the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, show that this second-line treatment, with less side effects, has similar activity to traditional chemotherapy given by vein every three weeks. Chemotherapy targets rapidly growing cells, but is often associated with severe side-effects such as nausea, diarrhea and hair loss. Iressa is not available in the United States.

Lung cancer, the most common cause of cancer-related death in men and the second most common in women, is responsible for 1.3 million deaths worldwide annually. The most common symptoms are shortness of breath, coughing with or without blood and weight loss.