Barcelona, May 11 (IANS/EFE): An international phase one clinical trial published on Monday and led by Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron Hospital shows that a combination of two new antibodies, that act against the same protein, reduces by 67 percent tumours in colorectal metastatic cancers that no longer respond to conventional treatment.

Josep Tabernero, head of Medical Oncology at Vall d'Hebron Hospital and director of the Vall d'Hebron Oncology Institute, said "this is important progress because we have showed this improvement for the first time in a clinical phase, although it is just one more step, it does not cure cancer, it only gives us more control time".

The study, published in the American Association for Cancer Research's Cancer Discovery journal, demonstrated that the drug "Sym004", a mixture of two antibodies that act against the EGFR protein, is effective in patients with advanced colorectal cancer who had become resistant to previous treatments with therapies inhibiting this protein.

This new drug opens the possibility for a treatment with better results in these advanced colon cancer cases. This is the second most common cancer type in the world with around 1.36 million new cases and 694,000 deaths every year.