PATIENTS from the North-East have been among the first in the world to benefit from a new skin cancer drug that has prolonged the lives of people with only months to live.

Now more North-East patients are expected to be recruited on to another clinical trial.

Professor Ruth Plummer, a consultant medical oncologist at the Freeman Hospital, in Newcastle, said that several of her advanced melanoma patients had done extremely well after taking a new pill called vemurafenib.

She was so impressed that a number of her other melanoma patients who had been receiving conventional chemotherapy had switched to vemurafenib.

Now Prof Plummer is planning to recruit more melanoma patients to a further trial involving vemurafenib.

Prof Plummer made her comments at an international cancer drug conference in Chicago, US.

Cancer specialists were told that vemurafenib has been shown to extend the lives of patients where melanoma has spread to other parts of the body.

The drug targets the activity of a faulty gene present in half of terminally ill advanced melanoma patients.

Results showed that after six months of treatment, 84 per cent of patients with the faulty gene who received vemurafenib were alive, compared with 64 per cent who received a more conventional drug.

Treatment with vemurafenib was found to reduce the risk of death by 63 per cent during the follow-up period compared to conventional treatment.

It also reduced the risk of the disease worsening compared to chemotherapy and shrank tumours in nearly half the patients who received it.

Prof Plummer, who is also clinical professor of experimental cancer medicine at the Northern Institute for Cancer Research in Newcastle, said the new drug was a major step forward.

While only a few patients have been treated with the experimental, unlicensed drug at Newcastle, Prof Plummer is in the process of applying for the next round of clinical trials involving vemurafenib.

She said: “It means North-East patients will have access to this drug.”

The North-East has the second highest mortality rate from melanoma in the UK, with 616.3 people dying per 100,000.

About 2,000 people in the UK die of melanoma each year, but the death rate is expected to rise to 15,500 a year by 2026.

Professor Richard Marais, from the Institute of Cancer Research, said vemurafinib was the biggest breakthrough in melanoma treatment in more than 30 years.