You see a commercial on TV for a new immunotherapy medication. It doesn’t promise a cure, not even a chance of a cure for some patients. It says it “may help you live longer.”
And the name sounds familiar, and you dig back into your friend’s status updates, and you see that, in fact, it’s the same medication that was featured in an article she shared, about the treatment her husband is receiving, though for kidney cancer rather than the lung cancer that was advertised on TV.
New studies of two drugs, showing that each works better than the standard treatment for advanced kidney cancer, should lead to changes in patient care, researchers said on Friday.
One study, of the drug nivolumab (sold as Opdivo), was stopped ahead of schedule because safety monitors found that patients receiving the drug were living longer than those in a comparison group taking the usual treatment, everolimus (sold as Afinitor). The study was halted for ethical reasons, to offer the comparison group nivolumab. [That is, when a study shows that one treatment is clearly more effective than another, even before the planned duration of the trial is complete, they offer everyone the better treatment.]
The other drug, cabozantinib (sold as Cometriq), was also tested against everolimus, and proved more effective at slowing the cancer’s growth. But that study has not gone on long enough to determine whether cabozantinib also prolongs survival.
And this is good news. This is great news. This is the sort of thing that gives one hope that someday we will have a cure for cancer, not just treatments that offer a good chance of a cure, with “cure” being pronounced after a given number of years without recurrence, but something that wipes out and shuts down the tumors.
But here’s what sucks: “Only 20 percent to 25 percent of patients respond to the drugs, and it is not possible to predict which people will respond.”
And, by the way, treatment is $150,000 per year — though the article doesn’t say how long the treatment generally lasts. As with all such treatments, it’s not clear to what extent this is a cost calculated to make back the research expense over the patent life of the drug, vs. manufacturing cost.
But how often do you get teary-eyed at a commercial? (Well, besides the Saturn “different kind of car company” commercials . . .)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In