Comment by xiphias2
3 years ago
This experiment of treating cancer with checkpoint inhibitors before chemotherapy should be widened to all cancers where the CI is available and effective as soon as possible, as it can cure lots of lives.
I'm worried that it will take many years until that happens.
The treatment is not without side effects. It's still a general therapy (it blocks all lymphocyte PD-1 receptors), not a cancer-target one.
Oncology is slow. It really is up to the patients to push the oncologist teams.
> I'm worried that it will take many years until that happens.
For good reason. If we detect cancers early, surgery and radiation are often very good nowadays--often allowing you to skip chemotherapy. And these are far less likely to kill the patient than a checkpoint inhibitor (which can overload your kidneys if it works or give you autoimmune diseases even if it doesn't).
The problem is that there are a lot of cancers we don't detect early-lobular breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, etc. And for things like intestinal cancers radiation is particularly bad.
These kinds of immune treatments are likely to get promoted first line treatments quickly if they really are this good--especially since they are likely to work on stage 4 metastatic cancers for which we don't have anything decent.
My ex girlfriend detected breast cancer early at age 28, but the doctors told her that she's ,,too young'' to have cancer. 1 year later on the checkup they said that it's too late (she has BRCA1 mutation). The last 10 years have been fighting with cancer, having about 10 operations on her, but the worst thing was chemotherapy (she said that she would rather die than go through it again, I think the dose had been too large for her probably as well, as she's 44kg). The cancer went away and came back multiple times, and it got so bad that we had to separate, but she's still my best friend (and I didn't find any other person to spend my life with).
She's right now on an experimental checkpoint inhibitor (stage 4 metastatic since a year ago), and it probably gives her another few months, but every time I see her I think that she only has a year left in her life and get sometimes frustrated that the experiments are not optimized to get the more effective treatments in earlier stage.
I sympathize. Cancer, especially in the young, is very tough. Patients really have to aggressively advocate for themselves, which itself comes with risks. And the treatments are devastating. The drug I worked on in grad school is really close to killing people to save them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorouracil
But, recent work with immune treatments for cancer give me hope. I have not seen so many doctors and scientists say things like "the tumor just melted away" before.
Maintaining well established medical procedures is much more important than some bio-robots dying.