Collaboration provides new insight into cancer treatment

Some collaborations change the face of treatment scenario, and this collaboration is one example of that. An immunologist collaborated with an oncologist to help fight the immunologist’s stepmother fight cancer, and turned the face of transformative therapy. The discovery is of a new class of drugs that help in bypassing a molecular break that stops the immune system from attacking tumors. The main problem in cancer is that patients immunotherapy doesn’t always work. Here, the researchers identified a unique type of immune-system cell that helps in predicting whether patients will respond to one of the medicines or not—significantly sorting out patients that can positively benefit from the therapy. This discovery is based on the analysis of 40 patients, whose cancer is treated with Keytruda, a checkpoint inhibitor from Merck & Co., which targets an immune-system brake called PD-1.