Immune boost for cancer patients

Advanced bowel cancer patients who have stopped responding to one of the main drugs used to treat the disease could be helped by immunotherapy, researchers have found.

Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have been exploring how tumours become resistant to cetuximab. They looked at 35 people with advanced bowel cancer and found cancer-killing immune cells were on average six times more active in tumours that had become resistant to cetuximab than those that had not responded to the drug at all.

Cetuximab only works in about half of patients and most will eventually stop responding.

A trial has begun to test how immunotherapy could benefit patients who have stopped responding to the drug.