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Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

nytimes.com

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Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#51

Post by byteCoder »

SteveNuts wrote: post #28
byteCoder wrote: post #8

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…

What was the treatment like? I've heard it's similar to having the worst flu of your life * 1000.

Yes, for the two days of high dose IL-2 every 8 hours, it was pretty bad. My experience was limited to nausea, fever, sweating, and bed-shaking rigors. I've heard that some patients experience hallucinations.

Note: IL-2 was administered after I received my lab-grown white blood cells. It acts as signal to one's immune system to activate. It was used to jumpstart my immune system after it had been replaced.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#52

Post by byteCoder »

wbl wrote: post #48
SteveNuts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the treatment like? I've heard it's similar to having the worst flu of your life * 1000.

He has a life. Melanoma is insanely deadly and painful.

Yes, the treatment was obviously totally worth it. And, I'm extremely grateful for being in the lucky 30% of patients who response completely to it.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#53

Post by byteCoder »

eecc wrote: post #19
byteCoder wrote: post #8

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…

That’s great news both for you and for all of us. 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

Yes, harnessing the patient's immune system to fight their cancer is a very promising technology and is saving the lives of many patients, even more as the processes and meds get further refined.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#54

Post by byteCoder »

shadowtree wrote: post #29

This is truly exciting and only just the beginning. There is a host of bio-tech startups following this initial wave - with two main goals: 1., Improve the treatments to become 100% cures 2., Lower the price This is very similar to tech and, say, the storage space. Went from 100k for a few GBs to peanuts for TBs on AWS pretty quickly. That's what momentum in a crowded space will do. Healthcare systems around the glob…

From an economic perspective, cures (or, even, long-term durable remissions) are definitely disruptive to the current models of care.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#55

Post by homero »

byteCoder wrote: post #51
SteveNuts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the treatment like? I've heard it's similar to having the worst flu of your life * 1000.

Yes, for the two days of high dose IL-2 every 8 hours, it was pretty bad. My experience was limited to nausea, fever, sweating, and bed-shaking rigors. I've heard that some patients experience hallucinations. Note: IL-2 was administered after I received my lab-grown white blood cells. It acts as signal to one's immune system to activate. It was used to jumpstart my immune system after it had been replaced.

Was there an option to be sedated? I wouldn't handle fever and shaking that bad, I'd panic.

Also I don't think I'd be eligible, I have ulcerative colitis which is autoimmune.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#57

Post by adventured »

mft_ wrote: post #44
throwawayf98 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How else do you fund future research? Taxes?

That's kind-of what happens... only in the US, it's a huge tax on ill people, rather than a smaller tax on healthy people.

You have it exactly backwards. The healthy people are in fact paying for the ill people (who typically don't come even remotely close to ever paying for the cost of their treatment/care). The real cost to cover healthy people is extremely low, they pay artificially inflated prices for their insurance that subsidizes care & coverage for other sick people.

In the US, 5% of patients represent over 50% of the cost of healthcare. 1% of patients are 20% of all expenses. The healthiest 50% represent just 3% of the healthcare system's costs - they're the financial offset group.

For downvoters that find facts uncomfortable: that's why the ACA needed to force all people to have insurance, it's a financial necessity to get as many paying healthy people in the system as possible to financially offset the cost of sick people if you want to try to make it work. This is healthcare system 101.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#59

Post by adventured »

mft_ wrote: post #45
danieltillett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well governments do subsidise research quite a lot (NIH et al). Putting caps on prices without doing something about research costs is just going to kill research. All the big pharma companies are laying off scientist every week because even with uncapped prices the returns are so low that it is not worth spending the money to develop new drugs. A more productive approach might be to look into why drug development ha…

> Putting caps on prices without doing something about research costs is just going to kill research. All the big pharma companies are laying off scientist every week because even with uncapped prices the returns are so low that it is not worth spending the money to develop new drugs. European countries pay much lower prices (although still relatively high vs. an average salary) vs. the US. The dirty secret is that t…

> European countries pay much lower prices

To be fair, European big pharma also lives off the US market to plump their margins. That subsidizes their ability to charge lower prices in Europe and elsewhere. They also constantly poach cutting edge biotech & pharma companies out of the US to keep their stables full, such as AveXis, Genzyme, Genentech, etc. Without constantly buying up elite US biotech, Europe would have practically no biotech industry at all.

The US is by far the world's largest drug market. It's heaven for Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche, AstraZeneca, et al. The US drug market is twice the size of the EU drug market, with ~37% fewer people.

Re: Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer with Immune Therapy

#60

Post by bengarrr »

byteCoder wrote: post #51
SteveNuts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the treatment like? I've heard it's similar to having the worst flu of your life * 1000.

Yes, for the two days of high dose IL-2 every 8 hours, it was pretty bad. My experience was limited to nausea, fever, sweating, and bed-shaking rigors. I've heard that some patients experience hallucinations. Note: IL-2 was administered after I received my lab-grown white blood cells. It acts as signal to one's immune system to activate. It was used to jumpstart my immune system after it had been replaced.

I wonder how a combination of aggressive immunotherapy and "sickness" counteracting effects of cannabis (for the nausea, fever, sweating) would do in making the immunothrerapy more effective and tolerable.
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