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In medicine, there is often the concern that a patient will not respond to a particular treatment, but in a turn for the books, physicians are now worried that a new cancer treatment might be so effective at eliminating tumors that it does more harm than good.
After receiving a single treatment of a novel combination therapy, a woman’s tumor seemingly “dissolved” from her chest in just three weeks, leaving her with a gaping hole in its place. The patient received the same cocktail of skin cancer drugs as almost 150 individuals enrolled in a clinical trial designed to test whether one of the therapies worked better on its own or when combined with another. While most patients did significantly better on the combination therapy, researchers were left gobsmacked by this woman’s rapid and dramatic response and have consequently described her case in the New England Journal of Medicine, alongside the trial results.
The therapies the scientists were investigating were the FDA-approved melanoma drugs Yervoy (ipilimumab) and Opdivo (nivolumab), which are both antibodies. The former works by interfering with a molecule that can switch off a type of cancer-fighting immune cell called a T-cell, whereas the latter blocks a pathway that can lead to the death of T-cells. Although they act in different ways, both drugs ultimately stimulate the immune system to fight cancer cells.
For the trial, 142 patients with melanoma that had spread to other parts of the body, or metastasized, were randomly assigned either Yervoy plus a placebo or Yervoy in combination with Opdivo. They found that, overall, patients in the combination group fared significantly better than those receiving Yervoy and the placebo. Fifty-three percent of these patients experienced at least 80% tumor shrinkage, and melanoma became undetectable in 22% by the end of the study—a remarkable response for stage IV cancer. None of the patients in the Yervoy monotherapy group achieved this outcome.
Read more here. (IFL Science)
After receiving a single treatment of a novel combination therapy, a woman’s tumor seemingly “dissolved” from her chest in just three weeks, leaving her with a gaping hole in its place. The patient received the same cocktail of skin cancer drugs as almost 150 individuals enrolled in a clinical trial designed to test whether one of the therapies worked better on its own or when combined with another. While most patients did significantly better on the combination therapy, researchers were left gobsmacked by this woman’s rapid and dramatic response and have consequently described her case in the New England Journal of Medicine, alongside the trial results.
The therapies the scientists were investigating were the FDA-approved melanoma drugs Yervoy (ipilimumab) and Opdivo (nivolumab), which are both antibodies. The former works by interfering with a molecule that can switch off a type of cancer-fighting immune cell called a T-cell, whereas the latter blocks a pathway that can lead to the death of T-cells. Although they act in different ways, both drugs ultimately stimulate the immune system to fight cancer cells.
For the trial, 142 patients with melanoma that had spread to other parts of the body, or metastasized, were randomly assigned either Yervoy plus a placebo or Yervoy in combination with Opdivo. They found that, overall, patients in the combination group fared significantly better than those receiving Yervoy and the placebo. Fifty-three percent of these patients experienced at least 80% tumor shrinkage, and melanoma became undetectable in 22% by the end of the study—a remarkable response for stage IV cancer. None of the patients in the Yervoy monotherapy group achieved this outcome.
Read more here. (IFL Science)
