“Pfizer Inc. and Novartis AG drugs have helped patients with the same cancer as Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs live longer in recent studies and Stanford University, near Apple’s home base, is testing new drug combinations,” Michelle Fay Cortez and John Lauerman report for Bloomberg.

“The Apple chief executive officer took a leave of absence in 2004 after saying he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a malignancy that strikes about 3,000 Americans a year,” Cortez and Lauerman report. “He left in 2009 for a liver transplant, sometimes done when the cancer spreads.”

“If Jobs’s third leave, announced to employees Jan. 17, means the malignancy is back, his treatment options now include a wave of new drugs that add months on average to survival rates, even as they carry side effects that can include fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting and low blood counts that can spur infection, doctors say,” Cortez and Lauerman report. “Jobs has already beaten the odds, according to a 2007 study finding that patients with the tumor die an average of three years after diagnosis.”

Cortez and Lauerman report, “Since then, ‘there have been advances that might be applicable to his case,’ said John Fung, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Digestive Disease Institute, in a telephone interview. ‘If he has a recurrence, it isn’t the end of the world.’ Fung said he hasn’t been involved in Jobs’s case.”

Full article here.