Doctors have discovered that a new cancer treatment can halt the progression of the disease in patients who do not respond to immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy uses the immune system to target and kill cancer cells, and it can save lives when other treatment options, such as surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy, fail. But this type of treatment can’t help all patients, and some tumors can develop to resist it.
Now oncologists in Britain have found a treatment that can reverse the cancer’s resistance to immunotherapy. They found that patients who were expected to die after exhausting all treatment options lived longer, according to the Guardian website.
The combination of pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, and guadcitabine, a new generation of DNA methylating factor, halted the progression of cancer in more than a third of patients enrolled in the first phase of the trial. The results were published in the journal Immunotherapy of Cancer.
Experts at the Institute of Cancer Research said the combination could become a new effective weapon against many forms of cancer.
The patients in the trial, from Royal Marsden Hospital and University College London, included patients with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer.
“I think one of the most important things about this trial is that we used several different approaches to look for changes in the immune system, which shows very strongly that it was affected by the combination therapy,” said lead researcher Professor Johan de Bono.
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