A new cancer treatment can halt the progression of the disease in patients who are resistant to immunotherapy, doctors have discovered, The Guardian reveals in an exclusive report.
Immunotherapy uses the immune system to target and kill cancer cells and can save lives when other treatment options, such as surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy, have failed. However, it cannot help all patients and some tumours can evolve to resist it.
Now oncologists in the UK have discovered a two-pronged treatment - immunotherapy combined with guadezitavine, a new experimental drug - that can reverse cancer's resistance to immunotherapy. Thanks to it, patients who were expected to die after exhausting all treatment options survived much longer, they discovered.
The combination of pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, and guadezitavine, a next-generation DNA hypomethylation agent, stopped cancer progression in more than a third of the patients in the first phase of the trial. The results were published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.
The dual combination could be an effective new weapon against various forms of cancer, said experts at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Foundation NHS.
The patients who took part in the trial, from the Royal Marsden Hospital and University College London, were diagnosed with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer.
«I think one of the most important things about this trial is that we used many different methods to look for changes in the immune system that showed that it was affected by the combination therapy,» said the study's lead investigator, Professor Johann de Bono.
De Bono, professor of experimental cancer medicine at the Institute for Cancer Research and consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden, added:
«In the long term we hope that if these effects are confirmed in other patient groups and future studies, guadezitavine and pembrolizumab could help address some of the immunotherapy resistance we see in too many cancers.».
