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

  • 6 years ago
Doctors Said Immunotherapy Would Not Cure Her Cancer. They Were Wrong.
One thing is clear, though: When pathologists examine these tumors, they find
white blood cells in them — as if the immune system were trying to attack.
“What we are seeing here is that we have not yet learned the whole story of what it takes for tumors to be recognized by the immune system,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma
and immunotherapeutics service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
One explanation, he and Dr. Van Allen said, is that the immune system may recognize
that cells in which genes are erratically turning on and off are dangerous and should be destroyed.
The women, strangers to one another living in different countries, asked their doctors
to try new immunotherapy drugs that had revolutionized treatment of cancer.
Immunotherapy drugs pierce that protective shield, allowing the immune system to recognize and demolish tumor cells.
If so, the patients will get an immunotherapy drug to help activate their white blood cells to attack the tumor
Still, “it is the exceptions that give you the best insights,” said Dr. Drew Pardoll, who directs
the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues found the same phenomenon in patients with hypercalcemic ovarian cancers.
“These are the cancers that rarely respond,” Dr. Pardoll said.