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Cure for Cancer One Step Closer After 'Spectacular' Breakthrough

posted by janrinok on Thursday June 04 2015, @07:49PM   
from the any-progress-is-good dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Patients with terminal cancer could "effectively be cured" by the discovery of a pair of drugs which can shrink tumours or bring them under control in nearly 60% of people with advanced melanoma.

In an international trial of 945 patients, treatment with the drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab stopped the cancer advancing for nearly a year in 58% of cases. This was compared with 19% of cases for ipilimumab alone, which resulted in tumours stabilising or shrinking for an average of two and a half months.

The treatment, known as immunotherapy, uses the body's immune system to attack cancerous cells. Researchers say it could replace chemotherapy as the standard treatment for cancer within five years.

[Paper]: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1504030#t=article

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Original Submission

• Re:PD-1 and CTLA-4 Re:PD-1 and CTLA-4 (Score: 4, Informative) by Joe on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:13PM

  by Joe (2583) on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:13PM (#192299)

  A very small number and it is hard for me to estimate off-hand, but there are probably some estimates derived from data about transgenic mice that contain one or two mutations (tumor initiating cells usually need around 100).

  In mice without an immune system you need to inject ~1000 tumor cells to get a tumor, but with an immune system the number is around 1-10 million. This depends on how tumorigenic the cancer is (cancer cells are a heterogenous population, where only a small number have the capablilty of forming a new tumor) and which tissue it is injected into (skin cancer cells will be more successful in the skin than in the blood).

  Along the same lines: patients with tumors often have hundreds of circulating cancer cells (that presumably came from the primary tumor) that never find a place to settle or, if they do, that can't actually expand into a new tumor (micrometastases).

  - Joe

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:PD-1 and CTLA-4 (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @12:00AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @12:00AM (#192308)

  So for about 10^9 stem cells in a given tissue, using your estimates by the time a tumor is found 10^6-10^7 lines that were 'precancerous' have already died out. Still there are plenty of stem cells left. Sound about right?

  Parent