immunotherapy

2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to Immunotherapy Researchers

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on Monday to James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options.

Their success, which came after many researchers had given up on the idea, “brought immunotherapy out from decades of skepticism,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It has, he said, “led to human applications that have affected an untold number of people’s health.”

Before Dr. Allison’s and Dr. Honjo’s discoveries, cancer treatment consisted of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal treatments. A statement from the Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.”

Earlier attempts by other researchers to recruit the immune system to fight cancer sometimes worked but more often did not. Dr. Allison and Dr. Honjo succeeded where others had failed by deciphering exactly how cells were interacting so they could fine-tune methods to control the immune system.

The checkpoint inhibitors now on the market are used for cancers of the lung, kidney, bladder, head and neck; for the aggressive skin cancer melanoma; and for Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers.

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Doctors Said Immunotherapy Would Not Cure Her Cancer. They Were Wrong.

The idea behind immunotherapy is to dismantle a molecular shield that some tumors use to avoid an attack by the body’s white blood cells.

The immune system sees these tumors as foreign — they are fueled by hundreds of genetic mutations, which drive their growth and are recognized by the body. But when white blood cells swarm in to attack the cancer cells, they bounce back, rebuffed.

Immunotherapy drugs pierce that protective shield, allowing the immune system to recognize and demolish tumor cells. But the new drugs do not work against many common cancers, that's why these results are so exciting.

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Combination Immunotherapy Shown to Be Effective Initial Treatment for Relapsed Hodgkin Lymphoma

Newswise — For many people with classical Hodgkin lymphoma, the disease is one of the most curable forms of cancer with standard chemotherapy or chemo plus radiotherapy. But for the 10 to 30 percent of patients whose cancer relapses, or doesn’t respond to initial therapy, secondary treatment often involves harsher chemotherapies followed by an autologous stem cell transplant, which uses a patient’s own stem cells.

Now, researchers led by Alex Herrera, M.D., assistant professor in City of Hope’s Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and a hematologist/oncologist, have found that a combination of two immunotherapy drugs — free of traditional chemotherapy — may be a more tolerable way for patients to fight the disease before a transplant.

"In our clinical trial, we studied a combination of two exciting new drugs — brentuximab vedotin and nivolumab — for treatment of relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma after the failure of frontline therapy and found that the combination was a safe, well-tolerated and highly effective bridge to transplantation,” said Herrera, who conducted the study with researchers from across the United States.

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