Immunotherapies Proving Successful In Treating Cancer
Merck, Bristol-Myers, AstraZeneca, and Roche are all currently working on immunotherapy treatments for cancer, Bloomberg News reports. According to Bloomberg, which highlights some of the recent developments in the immunotherapy field in a recent article, Merck’s MK-3475 drug has been successful, shrinking head-and-neck cancer tumors in 11 of 56 patients. Roche’s MPDL3280A immunotherapy has also worked well on patients, and on May 31st researchers presented data that showed that 13 of 30 patients with advanced bladder cancer saw their tumors shrink significantly after treatment.
Padmanee Sharma, a genitourinary oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, is optimistic about the future of immunotherapy. “I don’t think there is a tumor type that is not going to respond to some form of immune therapy,” she told Bloomberg. Sharma is currently working on research testing Bristol-Myers’ immunotherapy drug for pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, and gastric cancer.
Nicholas Vogelzang, an oncologist with U.S. Oncology Las Vegas, has called Roche’s immunotherapy treatment the “most promising” advanced bladder cancer treatment in 25 years.
Both Merck and Bristol-Myers have developed immunotherapies which have already seen success in clinical trials. Immunotherapies are different than traditional cancer drugs in that they manipulate the body’s own immune system into fight against cancer cells. While traditional cancer drugs need to be developed with different compounds and are extremely difficult to test, immunotherapies use functions that are already understood about the body to create cancer treatments. It is believed that immunotherapies can be more effective than current cancer treatments because the body’s immune system can remember what cancer cells look like in the long term, making it more difficult for cancer to spread or for remission to occur.
Immunotherapies work by binding to the PD-1 protein to stop cancer cells from manipulating it. This stops cancer cells from hiding from the immune system. Some immunotherapies instead target the PD-L1 protein, which various cancer cells use to flip the switch that manipulates the PD-1 protein.
Researchers note that while immunotherapies aren’t yet as effective at treating all patients as traditional cancer drugs, the responses tend to be long lasting while cancer cells can become resistant to traditional drugs.