Why we can finally dream of cancer cure, by top doctor
Consultant hails treatment that can train body to fight disease
‘It is an extremely exciting time’
CANCER immunotherapy treatments are now so advanced that scientists could be close to finding a ‘cure’ to the disease, according to a leading cancer specialist.
Dr Rebecca Kristeleit said it is an ‘extremely exciting time’, and the huge steps made in recent years are ‘really making a difference’ to sufferers.
Immunotherapy is a relatively new form of treatment that ‘wakes up’ a patient’s immune system so it can seek out and kill cancer cells. Normally the immune system spots and destroys faulty cells, but sometimes they can escape detection and develop into tumours.
Engaging the immune system in this way might have long-lasting benefits if it can ‘remember’ the cancer and stop it coming back. Scientists have made a number of significant breakthroughs in these treatments – with some immunotherapy drugs shown to be twice as effective as chemotherapy for specific cancers.
Current ‘ wonder drugs’ available on the NHS typically give patients only an extra few weeks of life, with 160,000 dying of cancer in the UK each year.
Dr Kristeleit, a clinical senior lecturer and consultant medical oncologist at University College London Hospital, said recent advances have given new hope to sufferers.
It came as doctors yesterday hailed a major skin cancer breakthrough after a new two-pronged treatment saw a man’s tumours disappear ‘completely’.
Speaking at the Hay Festival at the weekend, Dr Kisteleit said: ‘We have now got a number of molecular therapies which are benefiting patients substantially.
‘We are beginning to start thinking about using that word “cure.”
‘It’s not a word that you would ever say because we talk a lot about being “in remission” but “cure” is the Holy Grail. With some of the immunotherapies, some patients appear to just go on and on with no resurgence of the disease.
‘It is an extremely exciting time. They’re really making a difference, these immunotherapy drugs.’
Dr Kristeleit, who runs clinical trials looking at early- stage drugs, said that – although not yet available on the NHS – certain immunotherapies had been licensed and are shown to increase a patient’s cancer survival rate. This is particularly true in cases of the skin cancer melanoma and lung cancer, with doctors also seeing dramatic responses in the first human trials on gynaecological cancers. She recommended that patients who want to try immunotherapy talk to their oncologists about accessing trials.
Yesterday cancer experts in the US revealed they had successfully treated a metastatic melanoma patient by combining two types of immunotherapy for the first time.
The man, 53, had previously shown ‘little response’ to treatment, and his skin cancer had begun to spread, said the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Washington. But in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, lead researcher Dr Cassian Yee revealed that over five years later the patient remains ‘disease free’.
Scientists are closer to understanding the role of a gene closely linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
A study by the University of Birmingham found the BRCA1 gene attaches to a protein called ubiquitin in a process that is vital to DNA repair. But cells lacking this property become sensitive to agents that can damage DNA and increase cancer risk, said the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.