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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 11 2016, @01:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the seems-better-then-what-we-are-doing-now dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An immunotherapy drug has been described as a potential "game-changer" in promising results presented at the European Cancer Congress.

In a study of head and neck cancer, more patients taking nivolumab survived for longer compared with those who were treated with chemotherapy. In another study, combining nivolumab with another drug shrank tumours in advanced kidney cancer patients.

Immunotherapy works by harnessing the immune system to destroy cancer cells.

Advanced head and neck cancer has very poor survival rates.

In a trial of more than 350 patients, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 36% treated with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab were alive after one year compared with 17% who received chemotherapy. Patients also experienced fewer side effects from immunotherapy.

The benefits were more pronounced in patients whose tumours had tested positive for HPV (human papillomavirus). These patients survived an average of 9.1 months with nivolumab and 4.4 months with chemotherapy.

Normally, this group of patients, with advanced or treatment-resistant tumours, are expected to live less than six months.

Early data from a study of 94 patients with advanced kidney cancer showed that the double hit of nivolumab and ipilimumab resulted in a significant reduction in the size of tumours in 40% of patients. Of these patients, one in 10 had no sign of cancer remaining. This compares with 5% of patients showing tumour reduction after standard therapy.

[...] As yet, nivolumab has only been approved for treating skin cancer and in June it became one of the fastest medicines ever approved for NHS use, in combination with ipilimumab, for the same cancer. Nivolumab and ipilimumab both work by interrupting the chemical signals that cancers use to convince the immune system they are healthy tissue.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:19PM (#413008)

    So you'd break even if you spent $300K per person preventative, but lets go a tenth, $30K/person is a hell of a lot of dough to convince people that suntanning isn't cool or smoking crack isn't cool or dipping tobacco isn't cool or WTF causes this kind of cancer to begin with.

    Surely you're not implying that all cancer types have a direct cause, and are thus preventable...?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:23PM (#413011)
    Same AC here. Ignore my previous comment; I just went back and re-read your post.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:33PM (#413018)

    Haven't you heard? If you were virtuous enough, you'd live forever.