’18 MAY HAVE CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU
‘Biggest innovation is immunotherapy,’ doc says
The coming year will bring a host of new health care developments, including unprecedented breakthroughs in cancer treatments, new hospital protocols to accommodate mass shooting victims, and steps toward a onetime flu vaccine, according to local docs.
Immunotherapy — using the body’s immune system to fight cancer instead of harmful chemo and radiation — will continue to make headway as the future of cancer treatments, said Dr. Paul Biddinger, head of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“I think on the medical science front by far the biggest innovation is immunotherapy, and it’ll continue to explode this year,” Biddinger said. “When I talk to my oncology colleagues, they’re excited in a way they haven’t been before.”
Two types of immunotherapies were recently approved by the FDA: Novartis’ Kymriah and Kite Pharma’s Yescarta. Known as CAR T-cell treatments, they are used to program a person’s cells to destroy the cancer.
According to two studies out this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, immunotherapy showed high success in treating lymphoma.
Cancer is the world’s second-leading cause of death, and the World Health Organization predicts a 70 percent increase in cancer cases over the next two decades.
“I think it’s been an extraordinary year and the promise is quite something in terms of how much it’s going to improve,” Biddinger said of these therapies.
On the hospital side, Biddinger predicts a revamp of emergency protocol to maximize the number of lives that can be saved in a mass violence situation.
“We’ve been seeing more mass shooter events, and I think it’s pretty clear those events overwhelm even the biggest trauma centers,” Biddinger said. “Instead of old protocols, a true mass casualty protocol sets specific targets of what resources will be mobilized and how long it’ll take to mobilize them.”
MGH is already working on this, Biddinger said, and has consulted with health professionals in places where these attacks have occurred recently like Paris and Berlin.
“We’ve done a lot of work already on this,” he said. “People are going to start to be more aggressive with how they write these protocols. These events are so catastrophic they require a community wide response.”
On the infectious disease front, new agents are being added to vaccines to amp up the immune response, said Dr. Ben Kruskal, pediatric infectious diseases expert at Atrius Health.
“It’s a new era in vaccines that will be more effective and provide better protection,” Kruskal said.
These developments will usher in a “one-and-done flu vaccine,” he said, that would do away with the annual requirements.
“The possibility of a universal flu vaccine will probably not happen this year,” Kruskal said, “But it is definitely beginning to become more possible.”