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The newly discovered drugs combination for skin cancer can help if chemotherapy fails, extending patients’ lives by at least a year. In almost half of kidney cancer patients, by the time the disease is diagnosed it has already spread to other areas of the body due to a lack of symptoms, slashing life expectancy from five years to two. While chemotherapy, which kills both cancer and healthy cells, is used to treat most other advanced cancers, the treatment does not work for most kidney cancers.
The established treatment for the condition is either radiotherapy-which shrinks tumours or tyrosine-kinase inhibitor drugs, including one called sunitinib, which interrupt the blood supply to cancer. However, these only hinder the growth of tumours for four or five months. The drugs, ipilimumab and nivolumab, are already used with remarkable success in the treatment of deadly melanoma skin cancer.
Nivolumab is also used to treat advanced lung tumours. The new trial found that the combination achieved significant kidney tumour shrinkage in 42 per cent of the 425 patients in a trial and reduced the risk of death within two years by 37 per cent. Ipilimumab and nivolumab are immunotherapy drugs that work by enhancing the ability of the body’s immune system cells to attack and destroy cancer. Rather than just putting the cancer into remission for a period, like standard treatments, they appear to carry on working even after treatment has stopped
During the trial, 840 kidney cancer patients were given either sunitinib or the combination immunotherapy. Those on the combination had four infusions of the two drugs at three-weekly intervals. One-fifth of patients experienced severe side effects such as inflammation of the bowel or liver, and had to stop early. The median overall survival rate [the time at which 50 per cent of patients have died after treatment] for sunitinib was 26 months, but for the combination immunotherapy arm, it has still not been reached 36 months on. More than half the patients are still alive.
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