Listening To Patients As The Next Wave of Progress With Immunotherapy Is Unleashed: Bristol Myers Squibb’s Nick Botwood

“As we move forward, I think where we’re going to have the greatest impact is two considerations one is actually moving into earlier stages of disease,” Botwood told SurvivorNet. The other is investigating these combination treatments.

BMS has certainly played a huge role in the development and propagation of checkpoint inhibitors (often called PD-L1 Inhibitors), the class of immunotherapy drugs that work by turning off, or blocking, a part of the immune system that is preventing the body from working against cancer. One of the vexing and painful questions for patients and doctors has always been why checkpoint inhibitors don’t work in some people, and why these drugs stop working at some point. Some researchers, and the top pharmaceutical companies that support their work, believe that the efficacy of these drugs can be super-charged by adding in other medications and treatment modalities to magnify the benefit.

“Combinations of therapies are going to be incredibly important moving forwards,” Botwood explained. “And one of the big challenges for us is really to identify which patients are going to benefit from a combination therapy as opposed to a mono-therapy (just one treatment).”

“When you add drugs together in combination, the potential to increase the toxicity is real,” he added. “So you only want to do that when you know the benefit for the patient is going to greatly [outweigh] the risk.”

Looking to the Future of Immunotherapy Combinations

Researchers tell us that more than simply attempting to mash two drugs together, and hope for a better outcome, the key is understanding the molecular and biological pathways that enable these drugs to attack cancer.

For patients and the cancer community, a lot of the nuance and drug development is extremely hard to understand. At SurvivorNet, we think it's critically important that the community be exposed to some of the researchers and the people working in the industry, who devote their lives and their capital to drive the field forward.

In the case of Bristol Myers Squibb and its competitors in the checkpoint inhibitor space, the race to create new indications for the existing drugs and their combinations has undeniably provided a new set of tools for oncologists. These doctors have previously been sorely lacking in options when it comes to patients with severe and extremely hard to treat diseases such as lung cancer, melanoma, esophageal cancer, pancreatic cancer, and liver cancer.

When speaking to Botwood and his colleagues, as well as other companies investing in the oncology space, you get a sense of the scale of the industry that exists to try and attack these problems.

“We work with patient advocate groups and patients all around the world to advise on our development programs to help us really understand what is from a patient’s perspective important in our development programs and what matters to them,” Botwood explained.

Certainly there has been for the first time progress when it comes to treatments for some of these really difficult cancers, actually reducing mortality rates rather than prevention in early detection.

However, at major cancer conferences and in the every day struggle of cancer patients, it's not lost on many people that not enough progress has been made, and that the people who come together in clinical practice, industry, and patient advocacy need to continue doing a better job to accelerate these efforts.

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