Cancer researchers are pumping out study after study trying to figure
out how best to use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer
tumors.
Scientists led by Dr. F. Stephen Hodi at Dana Farber Cancer Institute
show for the first time that combining two drugs that target the immune
system in different ways could help melanoma patients survive longer.
From 2010 to 2011, 245 patients with advanced skin cancer who had not
responded to at least one previous treatment were randomly assigned to
get a newly approved drug, ipilimumab, designed to help the immune
system better target tumors, either alone or in combination with another
drug. Ipilimumab (marketed as Yervoy), was among the first anti-cancer
medications that allows immune cells to “see” tumors better; since
tumors grow from originally normal cells, the immune system often gives
them a pass and doesn’t attack them as foreign. But drugs like
ipilimumab, called checkpoint blockade inhibitors, help immune cells to
look past cancer’s disguise and target abnormally growing tumors.
In the study, those who received the combination of ipilimumab and
sargramostim, another drug that gives the immune system a laser-like
focus on the proteins found on tumors, survived an average of 17.5
months after the study began, compared to 12.7 months for those who took
ipilimumab alone. At the end of a year, nearly 70% of those receiving
the combination were alive, while 53% of those in the ipilimumab alone
group were.
“We show that the combination improves survival, and at the same time
decreases side effects,” says Hodi. The patients receiving the two
drugs reported fewer gut and respiratory complications, two of the organ
systems most affected by checkpoint inhibitor drugs like ipilimumab.
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