After nearly a century of development, a new wave of cancer treatment is achieving results that doctors are describing as almost impossible to believe. Immunotherapy works by training the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells, rather than attacking tumors with toxic drugs or radiation, and it is now producing outcomes once considered unthinkable, including patients watching their tumors disappear entirely without ever going into surgery. In one landmark trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, 84 out of 103 patients with various tumor types saw their cancers completely eradicated after treatment with a single class of drug, and only two required any additional surgery at all. One 71-year-old participant, who had already survived colon cancer once, described watching her esophageal tumor vanish after just four months of infusions: it is almost like science fiction, she said, but it is real.
Researchers say the field is now at a genuine turning point, with personalized cancer vaccines being developed that are tailored to the specific genetic makeup of an individual patient’s tumor, training the immune system to target only those cells while leaving healthy tissue completely untouched. Scientists are also finding that combining immunotherapy with radiation and other treatments makes tumors more visible to the immune system and boosts response rates in patients who would not otherwise qualify. Experts are careful to note that immunotherapy does not yet work for every patient or every cancer type, and that more research is still needed before these approaches can reach their full potential. But the pace of progress is accelerating rapidly, and leading researchers say they are speaking openly now not just about remission but about something they have rarely allowed themselves to say out loud: cures.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260410-how-a-new-wave-of-immunotherapy-is-eliminating-cancers
