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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Cancer trial of drug combination yields 'spectacular' results

• http://www.theguardian.com

Terminally ill cancer patients could be "effectively cured" of the disease using a powerful new combination of drugs described by scientists as heralding a once-in-a-generation advance in treatment.

A British-led trial brought "spectacular" results with more than half of patients with advanced melanoma seeing tumours shrink or brought under control using the drugs.

Prof Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Centre in the US, said the treatment, which uses the body's immune system to attack cancerous cells, could potentially replace chemotherapy as the standard cancer treatment within five years.

"I think we are seeing a paradigm shift in the way oncology is being treated," he said. "The potential for long-term survival, effective cure, is definitely there."

In an international trial, 945 patients with advanced melanoma were treated using the drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab. The treatments stopped cancer advancing for nearly a year in 58% of cases, with tumours stable or shrinking for an average of 11.5 months, researchers found.

This was compared with 19% of cases for ipilimumab alone, with tumours stable or shrinking for an average of two and a half months, according to the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr James Larkin, a consultant at the Royal Marsden hospital and one of the UK's lead investigators, told the BBC: "By giving these drugs together you are effectively taking two brakes off the immune system rather than one, so the immune system is able to recognise tumours it wasn't previously recognising and react to that and destroy them.


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