In Chicago, at the American Society for Clinical Oncology (Asco)
annual meeting, where so many promising cancer drugs have been announced
in the past, not always in the long term fulfilling the high hopes,
experts are saying that the results of a trial involving a combination
of two new immunotherapy drugs for melanoma patients are
spectacular.
Half the patients in the British trial, considered terminally ill and
with little time left, responded to ipilimumab, a drug licensed four
years ago, combined with the new and the unlicensed drug nivolumab.
On its own, ipilimumab works for around a fifth of patients. The
combination of the two shrank the tumours of 58% of patients. There is
hope they may disappear altogether. Results from the trial of 945
patients, led by the Royal Marsden hospital in London, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with the conference presentation.
Both ipilimumab, sold under the brand name Yervoy, and nivolumab were
developed by an American biotech firm called Medarex, based in New
Jersey and set up by a handful of immunologists from Dartmouth medical
school. Their belief in immunotherapy for cancer has been amply rewarded
– in 2009, their small company was bought by the pharma giant
Bristol-Myers Squibb. The following year, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced
the first major trial results of ipilimumab. Companies have been
clambering over each other to get involved ever since.
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