Breakthrough in cancer treatment
Until recently we had three main cancer treatments. We’ve had surgery for at least 3,000 years. We had radiation therapy in 1896. Then in 1946, research into chemical weapons led to the use of a derivative of mustard gas to kill cancer cells. Those toxins are the foundation for chemotherapy.
These “cut, burn, and poison” techniques are now estimated to cure cancer for about half of all people with the disease. And that’s brilliant, a real medical achievement. But it did not cure the other half of the patients. In 2017, in the US alone, that number was nearly 600,000 deaths from cancer.
This war has never been fair. We’ve been using simple drugs to fight the creative mutated versions of our own cells, trying to destroy diseased cells without affecting healthy cells, and make yourself weak in the process. And we did for a very long time.
But now we have a new and different approach – one that does not directly affect cancer cells, but rather the immune system.
Our immune system has evolved over 500 million years into an effective and individualized natural shield against disease. It is a complex biological system with a seemingly simple task: to find and destroy things that should not be in our bodies. Immune system cells are always on patrol, hundreds of millions of these cells circulating throughout the body, in and out of organs, looking for and destroying disease-causing invaders and damaged body cells. infected, mutated or damaged – such as cancer cells.
That begs the question: Why is the immune system still not fighting the cancer cells?
The answer is that they do, or try to do. But cancer uses tricks to hide itself from the immune system, shutting down our defenses and avoiding battle. We have no chance, unless we change the rules of the game.
Cancer immunotherapy is an approach to defeating those tricks, exposing the cancer, activating the immune system and restarting the battle. It’s fundamentally different from other cancer treatments that we have, because it doesn’t affect cancer cells at all, not in a direct way. Instead, it unlocks the natural killer cells of our own immune system and lets them do their job.
Cancer is us. It was the mistake that caused it. Cells in the body are constantly malfunctioning, their chromosomes damaged by particles of sunlight or toxins, mutated by viruses or heredity, age, or simply by random. Most of these mutations lead to the death of those cells, but some survive and divide.
In 99.9999% of cases, the immune system will succeed in recognizing the mutated cells and destroying them. The problem is that 0.0001% of the cells are malfunctioning, cells that the immune system doesn’t recognize as intruders and doesn’t kill. Instead, 0.0001% of those cells will eventually kill us.
For many cancer researchers, the apparent lack of an immune response to cancer means that the goal of supporting an immune response against cancer is useless – because there is nothing to help. Cancer is said to be so familiar to us that it cannot be recognized as “out of the body”. The concept of cancer immunotherapy seems to be flawed in nature.
But throughout history, doctors have documented a few rare cases in which cancer appeared to have resolved on its own.
In pre-scientific times these “spontaneous remissions” were attributed to magic or miracles; In fact, they’re thanks to an awakened immune system. For more than 100 years, researchers have tried and failed to replicate those miracles with drugs, vaccinations, or triggering an anti-cancer immune response like the ones that fight off cancer. terrible diseases such as polio, smallpox or flu.
There were glimmers of hope, but no reliable treatment. By 2000, cancer immunologists had cured hundreds of mice, but could not replicate those results in humans. Most scientists believed that they would never be able to succeed.
That has completely changed recently. Even to doctors, this change is invisible until it is right in front of their eyes. One of today’s best cancer writers, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, doesn’t even mention cancer immunotherapy in his excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the history of the disease, A History of the disease. Cancer: The Emperor of Panacea. The book was published in 2010, just five months after the first cancer immunotherapy drug of a new generation was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
That first class of cancer immunotherapy drugs is called “immune checkpoint inhibitors”. They are derived from the groundbreaking discovery of specific tricks, or “checkpoints,” that cancer uses as a secret handshake, to make a deal with the immune system: Don’t attack. New drugs will inhibit the checkpoints and block the secret handshake of cancer.
In December 2015, a second immune checkpoint inhibitor was used to unleash the immune system of former President Jimmy Carter. A malignant cancer had spread throughout his body and the prognosis was death; but instead, his immune cells cleared the cancer from his liver and brain.
The news of the miraculous recovery of the 91-year-old former President surprised everyone, including the patient himself. For many people, “that Jimmy Carter drug” is the first and only cancer immunotherapy they’ve heard of.
But breakthrough isn’t just a treatment or a drug; it is a series of scientific discoveries that broaden our understanding of ourselves and the disease, and redefine what is possible. It changes the choices and prognosis of cancer patients, and opens the door to a fertile and uncharted territory of medical and scientific research.
These discoveries confirm an approach to defeating cancer that is theoretically different from traditional approaches of cutting, burning or poisoning, which cures the patient instead of the disease. For the first time in our long battle with cancer, we understand what we are fighting, what tricks cancer has used in that battle, and how we can win.
Some call this the moon launch of our generation. Even oncologists, who are cautious, use the word cure. Exaggeration can be dangerous, just as illusion can be cruel. We always have a tendency to put too much hope in a new science, especially when it promises to turn the tables on a disease that has somehow impacted everyone’s lives. However, these are not overblown theories or anecdotal miracle cures, but proven based on solid data. Immunotherapy has gone from a dream to a science.
To date, only a few immunotherapies can be used. Less than half of cancer patients show a response to these drugs. But in patients who do respond, the disease goes into remission not just for weeks or months, but for a lifetime. Such a profound and long-lasting response is what makes cancer immunotherapy so promising, and what makes it so appealing to patients, but it’s important to keep in mind that that promise differs from that of cancer. The guarantee that every patient will get the same results. We still have a lot of work to do to broaden the reach and find a real cure. But the door has opened and we are just getting started.
Several immunotherapists I interviewed compared the discovery of the first cancer immunotherapy drugs to penicillin. When taken as medicine, penicillin immediately reduced the rate of infections, cured some bacterial diseases, and saved millions of lives.
But as a scientific breakthrough, it redefines what is possible and opens up fertile ground for generations of pharmacological researchers. Almost 100 years after that simple drug was discovered, antibiotics have become such a powerful global class of drugs that we take it for granted. The invisible threats that have plagued and poisoned mankind for millennia are now easily defeated with a common medicine.
The discovery of how cancer deceives and hides from the immune system was the moment that immunotherapy’s penicillin was discovered. The approval of the first checkpoint inhibitor, which brings dramatic and noticeable changes to cancer treatment outcomes, has helped redefine the direction of scientific research. Now that’s causing people to rush to research and invest in drug development.
Seven years after the first checkpoint inhibitor was approved, there are reports of 940 “new” cancer immunotherapy drugs being tested on more than half a million cancer patients in clinical institutions. . In addition, 1,064 other new drugs are in the preclinical stage in laboratories. But those numbers are tiny compared with the number of trials to test the synergistic effectiveness of combined immunotherapies.
Research is growing so rapidly that some pharmaceutical companies have generations of drugs waiting in line for clinical trials like airplanes waiting for space at LaGuardia (one of the largest and busiest airports in the country). USA), requires the FDA to have “fast track” and “breakthrough” processes to get them through the approval process quickly to cancer patients who don’t have time to wait.
Major advances in cancer treatment usually occur about every 50 years; Cancer immunotherapy has leapfrogged over a generation, seemingly overnight. To describe things to come, many scientists smile and use words like “tsunami” and “tidal waves”.
This development is rare in the history of modern medicine, and unprecedented in our history with cancer. We have the opportunity to fundamentally change our relationship with an illness that has long defined its limits.
The book “Immunotherapy: A Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment” is the story of geniuses, skeptics, ardent advocates, and most importantly, patients who bet their lives on it. life, and more so the people who lost it, to help improve and validate this hopeful new science. It is a journey of finding out where we are, how we got here, and a glimpse of the road ahead, told by those who first went through it, as well as some of the people who made it happen. it becomes possible.
Author of the book “Immunotherapy: A Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment” Charles Graeber is a former medical student and researcher. He is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. With the solid medical knowledge and the abundant pen of a talented journalist, his books, although written on science, are still fascinating works that attract readers from the first chapters.
By Business and Marketing
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