The winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine tells SurvivorNet that the next big wave of research of ways to treat cancer is likely to involve combining immunotherapy with targeted drugs.
Dr. Jim Allison, Chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, talked about the effectiveness of combining immunotherapy as a complementary treatment to traditional “targeted” therapies like chemotherapy and radiation for many types of cancer.
Read More“The one that I developed is called Checkpoint Therapy because … we identified these brakes on the immune system and figured out how to use those to keep T-cells that are in your body going and generate big numbers … of T-cells that’ll kill cancer cells,” he said.
Further, Dr. Steven Rosenberg, Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute who did major pioneering work in immunotherapy in his own right beginning in the late 1970s, says immunotherapy is gaining traction of late as a viable, effective addition to other cancer treatments.
"In the last several years, there's been an explosion of information that enables us to help larger numbers of patients by getting their body's immune system to fight this disease,” he says.
Now, Dr. Allison is continuing his groundbreaking immunotherapy research with the opening of the James P. Allison Institute at MD Anderson.
His wife, Dr. Padmanee Sharma, who has worked with Allison for years and is now the director of scientific programs at the institute, said in a statement that they hope to “develop new immunotherapy treatments” as well as “combination treatments that synergize immunotherapy with other cancer treatment approaches.”
“Combination strategies are essential to our future success,” Dr. Sharma said. “This work should give tremendous hope to our patients for the future of cancer treatment.”
She added: “I want patients to know that we are making advances every day. There are treatments that can offer cures, and we plan to deliver more.”
Immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy is, indeed, offering new hope for people with more and more types of cancer. Specific drugs that have been shown to improve patient outlook include:
- Tecentriq, which, when used as a complementary treatment to chemotherapy in a study of 900 women with triple-negative breast cancer, extended the lives patients by as much as 9 1/2 months compared to patients who were treated with chemotherapy alone.
- Obdivo, which was shown to have a survival length of 10.6 months in first relapsed acute myeloid leukemia patients, which was double that of such patients being treated just with chemotherapy.
- Keytruda, which, when treating patients battling non-small cell lung cancer, produced a 69.2% survival rate at 12 months when used in combination with chemotherapy, compared to a survival rate of 49.4% at 12 months when patients were treated with chemotherapy alone.
In addition, breakthrough studies are being done with such methods to fight bladder cancer and melanomaand the list goes on. It all spells exciting things to come as doctors and researchers continue to develop their understanding of the possibilities of this type of combination therapy, in which immunotherapies and traditional cancer treatments create a “doubly whammy,” as Dr. Allison puts it, of cancer-fighting power.
And the possible benefits are so widespread because, he continues, while targeted therapies must be different for each type of cancer, immunotherapy doesn’t have to be tailored individually.
“You’re not treating the cancer cell, you’re treating the immune system. So the cancer doesn’t really matter,” Allison says.
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