A clinical study has won regulatory approval to treat patients with extensive-disease (ED) small cell lung cancer (SCLC) by using self-derived natural killer (NK) cells in combination with chemotherapy.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare said Friday that it decided to approve the trial at the seventh meeting of its committee to review advanced regenerative medicine and advanced biopharmaceuticals this year.

The committee deliberated three advanced regenerative medicine clinical research projects submitted by Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital and others and decided to approve one, disapprove another, and reconsider the third.

The approved project is a study that uses NK cells in combination with chemotherapy to prevent further cancer progression in patients with extended-disease SCLC who have received standard primary chemotherapy.

Extensive-disease SCLC is defined as a disease with a median survival time of less than six months in the lung cancer patient group.

The study is expected to show the effect of inhibiting cancer progression after the first anticancer treatment, considering most patients develop drug resistance after the first chemotherapy and show a poor prognosis.