Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg News has a strong article today on a potentially huge breakthrough in cancer treatment that involves marshaling the natural immune system against cancer cells.
Leading the push is Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s experimental drug for skin cancer, one of dozens of immunotherapies to be spotlighted next week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. In its late stages, melanoma can be lethal within months, killing more than 65,000 people a year. Bristol- Myers’s drug, called ipilimumab, extended life in its deadly final phase, three small trials have found. If those results stand in data reported at the meeting, the drug may get U.S. regulatory approval as early as next year and may be in doctors’ hands in 2012, the company said in March 4 investor call.
I always like reading these stories but I've been around long enough to realize that few of them have happy endings. Back in the 1980s, The Wall Street Journal had a science/medical reporter named Jerry Bishop. Jerry would report a cure for cancer pretty much weekly. At a time when the WSJ was the bastion for hard-headed, clear-eyed realism in its reporting, Jerry made every random press release from a biotechnology company B1 above-the-fold news (and that's when the paper only had three sections, and the third was 95% data).
Today, sadly, almost all of these stories that are packed with promise end as this one does, with a disclaimer.
“The hope is that we aren’t just extending, but that we are really curing people with widespread cancer,” said O’Day, the researcher in California “It is a little early to say that, but there is hope.”
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