11–20 of 79 posts
Someone close passed away from lung cancer last year. He received immune therapy (keytruda), and while it may work wonders for others, it comes with drawbacks; My main issue was that it takes 4 to 5 treatments (with weeks between each treatment) before you even really know if it worked or not. This is valuable time that could be used to treat the cancer with chemo (which admittedly has way worse side effects than key…
Seriously groundbreaking. This is a once-in-a-decade paper. [1]
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1801005?query=fea...
Someone close passed away from lung cancer last year. He received immune therapy (keytruda), and while it may work wonders for others, it comes with drawbacks; My main issue was that it takes 4 to 5 treatments (with weeks between each treatment) before you even really know if it worked or not. This is valuable time that could be used to treat the cancer with chemo (which admittedly has way worse side effects than key…
Are there numbers that say what the success rate of immuni therapy is?
I hesitate to assign an exact percentage to the effectiveness since there are so many factors to consider, but I remember Keytruda being reported to shrink tumors in less than a third of patients who took it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there numbers that say what the success rate of immuni therapy is?
It sort of depends on what you define as success. The goal was never to "cure" the cancer, rather, to shrink the tumor. I hesitate to assign an exact percentage to the effectiveness since there are so many factors to consider, but I remember Keytruda being reported to shrink tumors in less than a third of patients who took it.
> “Chemotherapy has limitations. Immunotherapy has the ability to cure. I lead the Yale lung team. We have patients on these immunotherapies alive more than eight years.”
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?
You're not doing a lifetime of cancer research in hopes that you earn an average salary.
For the company, if you finally get somewhere with a drug that is affective, you have to try and recoup your investment. How else do you fund future research?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sort of depends on what you define as success. The goal was never to "cure" the cancer, rather, to shrink the tumor. I hesitate to assign an exact percentage to the effectiveness since there are so many factors to consider, but I remember Keytruda being reported to shrink tumors in less than a third of patients who took it.
The goal is to cure, from the article, quoting the head of lung at Yale: > “Chemotherapy has limitations. Immunotherapy has the ability to cure. I lead the Yale lung team. We have patients on these immunotherapies alive more than eight years.”
I’m now 5.5 years post-treatment with immunotherapy for Stage IV melanoma and have had no evidence of disease for over four years. When immunotherapy works, it can be impressive. For me, my treatment (adoptive cell therapy using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes) used my own white blood cells (130 billion in lab-selected and expanded form) to overwhelm the mutated cancer cells. It was a one-time treatment (over 3-4 week…
I hope all patients that would benefit from this treatment will have access to it, to save their lives and to validate and improve the therapy for all those to come
Fuck you and the fuck the US healthcare system. Daddy or mama gets to live a few more years, but it will put the family into lifelong debt. I'll say it again, fuck you.