Comment by nextos
3 years ago
Immunotherapies are still immature but far from snake oil at this stage. They routinely achieve miraculous remissions but also lead to many adverse events. For most late stage tumors, chemotherapy will only, at best, increase life expectancy a bit. In my opinion, the choice is obvious.
Imminotherapies very quickly kill a significant percentage of the people who try them. So it’s a complicated balancing act when someone is likely to die in say 1-2 years but also likely to survive another 6 months.
For people who are likely to die very soon the case is more clear cut, but the people developing these treatments don’t have the resources or infrastructure to try and treat more than a tiny handful of people. Allowing people to pay for such treatments also opens the door for a huge range of bad actors which also costs lives. I am not saying the current system is great, just that there’s a lot more complexity than is obvious on the surface.
Your comment makes something that happens quite rarely (1-5% based on agent, and not quickly) seem like it happens quite frequently.
Some of these trials had double digit percentage deaths within 30 days.
3 replies →
I have a good friend who went through Immunotherapy on a Stage 4 lung cancer and had an impressive recovery (all the metastasis tumours disappeared in the scan pictures I've seen). Not cured of course, but has a much longer life expectancy. So I've seen at least one anecdotal evidence that they work.
Keytruda, and other PD-1 blockers, have good science behind it. Many oncologists believe this is the true path to defeating many cancers.
While PD-1 blockers may cause the immune system to attack another part of a patient's body, we have quite a few ways to treat those autoimmune issues.