4 ms·
It's always great to get positive results, but this is very much old news. The two drugs from this particular study, ipilimumab and nivolumab, have been around
by mrosett 5y ago
It's always great to get positive results, but this is very much old news. The two drugs from this particular study, ipilimumab and nivolumab, have been around for a decade, and they've been used in combination to treat various other solid tumors. They really are breakthroughs, which is why James Allison won the 2018 Nobel for discovering ipi and why nivolumab (marketed as Opdivo) is among the top ten selling drugs in the world.
Note that the actual trial referenced by this article, CheckMate-651, failed its primary endpoint [1]. The positive result is only for a subpopulation of patients with high expression of one of the targeted proteins.
Anyway, if you haven't heard about immunooncology, it really is an amazing field with lots of great results. But this particular article about very incremental work.
[1]: https://www.onclive.com/view/nivolumab-ipilimumab-misses-os-end-points-in-frontline-head-and-neck-cancer-but-shows-trend-toward-benefit-in-subset https://www.onclive.com/view/nivolumab-ipilimumab-misses-os-...
- hikerclimber1 5y agoEverything is subjective. Especially laws.
- testfoobar 5y ago"Cancer breakthrough" / "Cure for cancer" stories must have very high click-thru rates due to the frequency we see them.
- philjohn 5y agoSomeone I know was fortunate enough to get onto one of the clinical trials for ipilimumab - he had Malignant Melanoma that had spread to a nearby organ. He's still alive 15 years later, despite the survivability for Melanoma that has spread is dire. That's, of course, a single piece of anecdata, but the power of biologicals in how we treat disease going forward cannot be understated.
- mrosett 5y agoSounds familiar: I had a one-in-four chance of surviving melanoma before I enrolled in a trial of ipilimumab 11 years ago. It really was an amazing breakthrough.