Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

tosseraccount wrote: post #3

Some people with a particular mutation profile get to live a few months longer. For $100,000.00 I guess the upsides are it does appear to be more than a month or two and the side effects are manageable.

Well worth the $100k I would say.

Re: Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

#6

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

Quick notes:

* It's almost 60% of advanced melanoma patients

* Advanced melanoma is difficult to treat

* Small-seeming improvements in lifespans for late-stage cancer patients can be very significant, given the lethality of late-stage cancer

* One of the two drugs, Nivolumab, also recently demonstrated effectiveness against advanced lung cancer --- another difficult-to-treat cancer

Reddit AskScience is probably a good place to watch for updates on this.

Re: Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

#7

Post by ksenzee » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:32 PM UTC

tldr: They studied two drugs in people with advanced melanoma, and the combination works better than you would expect: median survival for people taking both drugs was almost a year, compared with ~3 months for one of the drugs and ~7 months for the other. It confirms that the newer immunotherapy drugs are great, and save a lot of lives. It's not a new scientific breakthrough, as you might think from reading just the headline.

Re: Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

#8

Post by remarkEon » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

tosseraccount wrote: post #3

Some people with a particular mutation profile get to live a few months longer. For $100,000.00 I guess the upsides are it does appear to be more than a month or two and the side effects are manageable.

FTA: The findings, revealed at the at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, could save tens of thousands of lives in the UK alone within a decade, doctors say. Patients who could expect to live for just a matter of months under existing treatments, could see their tumours completely destroyed and go on to enjoy a normal lifespan under the new treatment.

If you're talking about average effects, sure, it might be just a few months longer.

Re: Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

#9

Post by epistasis » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

msie wrote: post #4

msie wrote: post #2

Another 999 steps to go...

Dear Downvoter, Am I wrong?

You're presumably referring to the 1000 mountains PhD comic (was XKCD). The difference with the immune drugs is that the immune system can recognize ~500 of the 1000 mountains (the most mutated cancers). So by getting around the immune-evasion system, the immune system can clean up most highly-mutated cancers.

Re: Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

#10

Post by Brakenshire » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #6

Quick notes: * It's almost 60% of advanced melanoma patients * Advanced melanoma is difficult to treat * Small-seeming improvements in lifespans for late-stage cancer patients can be very significant, given the lethality of late-stage cancer * One of the two drugs, Nivolumab, also recently demonstrated effectiveness against advanced lung cancer --- another difficult-to-treat cancer Reddit AskScience is probably a goo…

The NHS has a site called 'Behind The Headlines' which analyses articles about medical discoveries which appear in the media. It's also worth a look:

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/06June/Pages/Immunotherapy-drug-...

Some useful points:

> "Severe side effects were seen in 55% of those taking the combination, 27% of the ipilimumab group and 16% of the nivolumab group. The most common of these side effects were diarrhoea and bowel inflammation...Side effects of the drugs were also a considerable problem. After one year, only a relatively small proportion of people in all treatment groups were still taking the drugs. In the combination group people had often stopped taking the drugs because of side effects. It will be important to compare people’s quality of life while taking these different drugs and their combination."

...

> "Some of the wide media coverage of this study, arguably moves into the realm of hype. Much of the reporting could give the impression that immunotherapy is a new discovery. In fact it was first used in the late 1980s, and has been used in the treatment of various conditions."

...

> Overall, people taking the combination lived longer without the disease progressing (average 11.5 months) compared with either drug alone (average 6.9 months with nivolumab and 2.9 months with ipilimumab). People whose tumour displayed the protein that nivolumab targets (PD-L1), did just as well with nivolumab alone as the combination. The study is ongoing and it’s not yet known whether people taking the combination treatment live longer overall than those taking the individual drugs.