World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial
30 comments
·February 27, 2025crispycas12
trhway
Do they give immunotherapy before, after or instead of chemo? Asking because I heard what it is after in some cases and that puzzled me as chemo usually hits immune system.
JohnMD
I would like to see a clinical trial with patients who have Stage 4 disease being treated with multiple immunotherapies, up to 5 or 6 IV and oral immunotherapies. Why are we holding back in a population with poor prognosis??
As far as legislation, we should pass "Right to Try" laws. Allowing anyone with Stage 3 or 4 to pick an immunotherapy regardless of whether it's been approved. We should never allow hope to die!
lumost
There is a bound on the degree to which terminal patients are willing to be human guinea pigs, and a bound on which the data is statistically useful to anyone.
I’ve read many reports of terminal patients who wish that they hadn’t wasted the last few months of their healthspan searching for Hail Mary treatment options. If you were to ask yourself what you would do with 1-3 months of healthy life left, would you spend it in a hospital on chemo?
s1artibartfast
Why can't you start a trial and do just that? Doctors have discretion up to the practical limit of being sued by their patients.
kohbo
I'm not a fan of stuff in very early stages like this being posted
femto
This one is an unusual case, as the clinical trial is coming after the first patient (Scolyer) was treated. It's also interesting due to its aspect of "Physician, heal thyself", as Scolyer's own research formed the basis of his treatment. Scolyer doesn't seem to have been directly involved in his treatment, in that it was designed by his collaborator, Georgina Long, and executed by another team.
Retric
A scheduled clinical trial is fairly late in the process.
It’s a specific treatment being evaluated not just some pathways discovered in rodents that looks promising.
1970-01-01
Agreed. Good but very early news isn't that interesting. It needs at minimum a clinical trial.
Panzer04
Presumably this is the Richard Scolyer case, if anyone was curious.
A brief lookup indicates he could possibly be seeing recurrence; hopefully that's not the case but this is something that many people have said about his trial. We can't say for sure this treatment is going to be broadly effective without more time and experiments.
sokols
This might be related with the case of Richard Scolyer, the Australian pathologist diagnosed with Glioblastoma. He was receiving some kind of experimental treatment for it.
crispycas12
I believe he got just got either Ipilimumab and Nivolumab as a combo therapy or Pembrolizumab. He's a researcher who focuses on neo-adjuvant (use therapy before resection) therapy in melanomas. It was a good gamble to try the same paradigm in Glioblastomas
unstyledcontent
This is hopeful news for a really tragic cancer.
fragmede
It's not a generic novel treatment against any and all cancers, as much as the headline would lead you to conclude.
crispycas12
You're mostly correct but immunotherapies do work for a many different type of cancer. The issue is differences in tumor biology plays a major factor. The even bigger caveat is that given a sufficient amount of tumor mutational burden (TMB), immunotherapies are found to be effective for any solid tumor. Granted most patients don't have the sky had TMBs needed for it to be effective
adamredwoods
It's triple therapy, which most doctors won't do, which I think is one of the future steps to stopping cancer. We should have been looking at combination therapy a long time ago. Hopefully this will get oncologists to push the envelope a bit more.
wisaacj
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doormatt
[flagged]
Brian_K_White
Remind me again what glioblastoma is? Is it some form of diabetes? Cateracts? A bacterial infection? Vitamin D deficiency?
Is this an arthritis treatment?
Is this a fertility treatment?
It is in fact a cancer treatment.
My wife is cooking fish at the moment. Wait, she's coking trout, not "fish". Except wait, slovenly fog brain, she's cooking rainbow trout, not "trout".
ktallett
This is a rather pedantic comment, it is a world first for a common cancer type, giloblastoma, therefore world first for cancer treatment is correct.
dgfitz
I drove a buddy of mine to work for years because of his glioblastoma, once he recovered from having 37 staples in his skull.
Recently I’ve been dealing with cancer as well, lost a nipple in the process. We are both under 40.
Cancer sucks, any positive progress in sorting out ways to treat and defeat cancer is only a good thing.
ziddoap
"Glioblastoma [...] is the most aggressive and most common type of cancer that originates in the brain"
acdha
What value do you think this pedantry adds to the conversation? Do you really think that many readers here were going to assume it meant a universal cure for all types of cancer and somehow be harmed by getting their hopes up for the second or two needed to read more than the headline?
Loughla
I've been scolded on here that some folks may be on the spectrum and not understand the implications of these sentences.
I understand that, but I also understand that people who are willfully ignorant and overly pedantic will hide behind any excuse they can get. To be clear I'm not saying all folks on the autism spectrum are those things, just that some people will appropriate whatever title they need to feel vindicated.
I would be surprised if anyone read that headline and thought that it meant every single cancer.
dumbledoren
It cant be coincidental that this news with a misleading headline is being pushed right at the time when a revolutionary Chinese drug changed the landscape.
aj_icracked
Out of curiosity, and I'm living under a rock.. which one?
It's neo-adjuvant (treat prior to surgery) with a three mAbs: Ipi + Nivo, which is a well established combo of immunotherapeutics for many solid tumors, rounded out with relatlimab which I'm less familiar with (LAG-3 inhibition). Neoadjuvant use of immunotherapies is established concept and is utilized in clinical practice for non-small cell lung cancer and colon cancer. This is the first time I've seen a use of 3 immunotherapies used at once: Ipi + Nivo isn't the most tolerable treatment regimen. Other novel aspect is use of neoadjuvant therapy in GBM.