Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#2complaints about study funding aside, checkpoint inhibitors really are stunningly effective for some cancers.
it’s the first major advance we’ve had in oncology in maybe 25 years.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#3Went to a talk about immunotherapy last year, toxicity of these class of therapeutics was way better than the best other available treatment. Sadly still too nascent, but don't forget to ask for it if you can.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#4The 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?
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#5complaints about study funding aside, checkpoint inhibitors really are stunningly effective for some cancers. it’s the first major advance we’ve had in oncology in maybe 25 years.
Haven't there been fairly significant advances in using specialized chemotherapies for specific forms of cancer? This at least has been my impression from a few books I've read.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#6The 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?
It's all 3.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#7The 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?
It's way more than $100,000 a year too. My treatment alone (Keytruda, every 3 weeks) is around $300,000 a year; about double the price the company will quote you if you ask, because they don't estimate the cost it takes to get blood work, get seen by an oncologist, and then get the treatment administrated to you safely by a trained nurse ready to respond to any adverse events that may spontaneously occur during infusion. However, thanks to current health care law in the US there are caps on the amount of out-of-pocket expenses your insurance can charge you. I have run of the mill bigco health insurance and my personal max out-of-pocket cost (after premiums, deductibles, etc.) is at least two orders of magnitude less than the cost to insurance.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#8I’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 weeks in the hospital) with no further meds or other treatments required.
Immunotherapy has become an important tool in the future of fighting cancer, for sure.
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#9I remember reading this recent Financial Times article[0] about how China is innovating in the area of providing immunotherapy and other breakthrough treatments.
[0]: https://outline.com/tdDNdd
[1 non-outlined link]: https://www.ft.com/content/30b5a944-3b57-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a...
Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy
#10Someone 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 keytruda, but still).