New Breakthrough Immunotherapy drugs are becoming even more proficient at curing a vast field of cancers and the number of ailments they can help with just keeps broadening, this includes rare and intractable tumors that have proved extremely difficult to treat with more conventional methods like chemotherapy. Researchers and scientists are saying that it will become the forefront of the nation’s cancer treatments.
On Tuesday, scientists reported that the medications, which commandeer the body’s own immune system’s defenses, are proving to be more and more effective when it comes to treating extremely complicated head and neck cancer, it’s also showing the same improvements in curing an extraordinarily deadly form of skin cancer by the name of Merkel cell carcinoma.
“These results have implications that go far beyond a rare cancer” like Merkel cell carcinoma, said Paul Ngheim, an investigator with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who led that study. The new analytics, plus more research that was released on Sunday showed an exceedingly higher survival rate in advanced-melanoma patients who received immunotherapy… In addition to melanoma, the treatments have also been in the fight against lung and kidney cancers.
“We are in the midst of a sea change in how we are treating cancer,” said Louis Weiner, director of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, “We’re really seeing the fruits of many years of research into what drives cancer and how it interacts with the immune system to defeat it and survive.”
One of the most well-known successes of the Immunotherapy drug Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab, is the former President Jimmy Carter, who last year was diagnosed with advanced melanoma that had spread to his brain. He was treated with Keytruda. The treatment worked so well, it caused his tumors to disappear, and his treatment was ceased in march… “What’s happening to Jimmy Carter is happening to many, many people,” Weiner said.
