This is amazing news. Many of the articles about "a cure for cancer" that get posted here and elsewhere don't pan out, but this is the real deal. Obviously the

This is amazing news. Many of the articles about "a cure for cancer" that get posted here and elsewhere don't pan out, but this is the real deal. Obviously the goal isn't 50% survival - it's 100% - but we've come a long way. I was diagnosed with melanoma in 2010. At the time, the standard of care for melanoma was remove it surgically... and then cross your fingers and hope it doesn't come back. During the 3 month interval between when I was first diagnosed and when we learned that the cancer had spread, that changed. The first paper showing an overall survival benefit for melanoma patients (by dosing them with ipilimumab) was published in the NEJM in June 2010. Although ipilimumab (marketed as Yervoy) wasn't approved by the FDA until the next spring, I was able to get access to a very high dose of the drug through a clinical trial. The trial was weird in a couple ways. First, I can get on clinicaltrials.gov, pull up the results of my study, and calculate that if I'd been put in the placebo arm of the trial, there's a 25% chance I wouldn't be here to write these words. That's a strange thing to know. Second, the side effects were really unusual and unpleasant. I didn't have to endure the acute toxicity you get from chemotherapy, so that was a blessing. On the other hand, immunotherapies (like both of the drugs referenced in this study) mess with immune regulation mechanisms that apparently aren't supposed to be messed with. My personal experience ranged from the mundane to the miserable: fatigue, severe acne, absolutely excruciating eye infections, and other stuff I won't get into here. I'm still dealing with some of these issues almost a decade later, but the key point is that I'm here to deal with them! Ipilimumab was the first step; James Allison recently won a Nobel prize for discovering the protein that it targets. Nivolumab (marketed as Opdivo) actually gives even better performance, so nivo is the standard and is sometimes supplemented with Yervoy (or so I understand; I'm not a physician.) I can only imagine what the side effects of the combination therapy are like. Remarkably, both drugs were developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb.