At The Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley reports that technology is helping to defeat cancers that not long ago would have been untreatable. She writes:
James Watson, the geneticist who discovered DNA’s double-helix structure, died Nov. 6 at 97, his late-life goal within reach. “I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime,” he told me in 2010. “It might be. I would define ‘cancer cured’ as instead of only 100,000 being saved by what we do today, only 100,000 people die. We shift the balance.”
Cancers that were considered death sentences not long ago—e.g., advanced melanoma, non-small-cell lung and blood cancers—are now curable. Rather than carpet-bomb cancer with chemotherapy and radiation, oncologists are deploying the pharmaceutical equivalent of drones and precision missiles.
Consider some cancer advances over the past decade.
• Checkpoint inhibitors. These work by preventing cancer cells from evading detection by the immune system. The Food and Drug Administration approved Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda for metastatic melanoma in 2014. Keytruda has since been approved for some 40 types of cancer and become a mainstay in oncology treatment. Drugmakers are working to develop more next-generation immunotherapies.
• Oncolytic virus immunotherapies. These shoot a virus such as herpes into tumors, causing them to self-destruct. The bursting tumor shoots out flares that spur the immune system’s T cells to kill cancer cells around the body. One-third of melanoma patients who failed to improve on other immunotherapies experienced remission on one of these experimental treatments by Replimune.
Read more here.
