Scientists hail 'new era' for cancer treatment
Experts have hailed a “new era” for cancer treatments after
achieving what they called “spectacular” results from trials on a new class of
drugs. Immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s immune system to
attack cancerous cells, is proving so effective that in one British-led trial,
more than half of patients with advanced melanoma saw tumours shrink or brought
under control, researchers said.
A number of trials of the drugs have been presented at the
American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago. Prof Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Centre in the
US, described some of the findings as “spectacular” and said immunotherapy
could replace chemotherapy as the standard treatment for cancer within the next
five years, according to reports. He told reporters: “I think we are seeing a paradigm shift
in the way oncology is being treated. The potential for long-term survival, effective cure, is
definitely there.”
Prof Peter Johnson, the director of medical oncology at Cancer Research UK,
said: “The evidence suggests we are at the beginning of a whole new era for
cancer treatments.” In an international trial, 945 patients with advanced
melanoma were treated with the drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab. The treatments
stopped cancer advancing for nearly a year in 58% of cases, with tumours stable
or shrinking for an average of 11.5 months, researchers found. This was compared with 19% of cases for ipilimumab alone,
with tumours stable or shrinking for an average of 2.5 months, according to the
research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr James Larkin, a consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital
and one of the UK’s lead investigators, told the BBC: “By giving these drugs
together you are effectively taking two brakes off the immune system rather
than one so the immune system is able to recognise tumours it wasn’t previously
recognising and react to that and destroy them. “For immunotherapies, we’ve never seen tumour shrinkage
rates over 50% so that’s very significant to see. This is a treatment modality that I think is going to have a
big future for the treatment of cancer.”
Dr Alan Worsley, Cancer Research UK’s senior science
information officer, said: “This research suggests that we could give a
powerful one-two punch against advanced melanoma by combining immunotherapy
treatments. Together these drugs could release the brakes on the immune
system while blocking cancer’s ability to hide from it. “But combining these treatments also increases the
likelihood of potentially quite severe side-effects. Identifying which patients
are most likely to benefit will be key to bringing our best weapons to bear
against the disease.”
