Immune drugs offer hope for cancer patients

HEALTH EDITOR A “GAME-CHANGING” class of drugs that harness the body’s immune system have been found to extend survival in sufferers of some of the deadliest cancers in early trials.

One in ten patients expected to die of kidney cancer had a “complete response” to a combination of the drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab, meaning the tumour was eradicated.

Forty per cent of patients with incurable kidney cancer saw a significant reduction in the size of their tumours. Standard treatments achieve this in just five per cent of cases.

The findings will be presented to the European Society for Medical Oncology conference, in Copenhagen, this week,

Around 11,900 people are diagnosed with kidney cancer in the UK each year, with 12 people dying every day from the disease.

Separate research on patients with head and neck cancer found a doubling in one-year survival among patients given nivolumab.

After one year, 36 per cent of patients were alive, compared with 17 per cent of those not on the drugs. And fewer patients experienced serious side effects from taking the drug compared with conventional treatment.

The class of drugs – called immunotherapy – was last year hailed as showing “spectacular” results against skin cancer and lung disease, when results were presented in the United States.

Earlier this year, a man riddled with 26 tumours, thought to be on the brink of death, was found to have been effectively cured by the therapies.

All immune cells contain a switch which turns them off when they come across something that is not harmful. But cancer has evolved also to flick that switch thereby avoiding the body’s defences.

Nivolumab, which is marketed as Opdivo, works by removing the switch so that immune cells can spot cancer cells and clear them out of the body.