Clinical trials show success for new Cancer Treatment

Patients with advanced bladder, head and neck cancer, and classical Hodgkin lymphoma were among those whose lives were extended by immunotherapy.
Unlike surgery, radio or chemo, immunotherapy doesn’t directly target cancer cells. Instead, it retrains the immune system, which finds pathogens but doesn’t see cancer cells, to fight them.
Some cancer cells, for instance, multiply aggressively because they produce a signal called PD-L1 which deactivates the immune cells around them. Immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors block that signal and free immune cells for the cancer-fighting cause.
In two trials of previously treated metastatic bladder cancer patients, the immunotherapy drugs atezolizumab (brand name Tecentriq), which was FDA approved last month, and nivolumab (brand name Opdivo), shrunk tumours by 30% in at least a fifth of patients.
On nivolumab, 45.6% of bladder cancer patients survived for at least a year, a follow-up study showed, “better than anything we’ve seen in the past”, according to oncologist Padmanee Sharma, who was involved in the trial.
Another checkpoint inhibitor called pembrolizumab (brand name Keytruda) was tested on heavily pre-treated patients with reoccurring or metastatic head and neck cancer.
In this study, 18% of 192 patients responded with either partial or full remission of tumours, and 65% of the responders continued to respond for 30 months.