According to an international Phase III clinical trial, led by researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, advanced lung cancer patients already treated with chemotherapy might be able to skip some of the bad side effects of another series of chemo by taking a pill instead. Patients taking “Iressa,” an expensive, newer targeted treatment, survived about as long as those on another course of chemotherapy. The results of the large clinical trial were published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

The trial was designed to compare “Iressa,” a daily pill, to “Taxotere,” an IV-chemotherapy drug that's administered every three weeks.

“Iressa” is not available in the United States, but a similar drug, “Tarceva,” is. AstraZeneca stopped selling "Iressa" in the United States after tests showed it only helped about 10 percent of patients.

"You can be treated for lung cancer. There are different therapies available, and they have different side-effect profiles," Dr. Edward Kim, an assistant professor at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said. "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."

Kim's team tested 1,466 patients in 24 countries who had completed a first course of standard chemotherapy. Half got “Iressa” as second-line treatment and half got docetaxel. Both sets of patients lived about as long - that is eight months on average. The most common side effects in “Iressa” patients were rash, acne and diarrhea. The patients on chemo most often suffered from fatigue, a higher risk for infections, and hair loss.

Lung-related cancers kill approximately 1.4 million Americans each year, and the treatment options for those suffering from a lung-related cancer are very limited.