Novel approach to battling cancer sees striking success in Hodgkin lymphoma patients

Robert Levy in the Harvard Medical School website:

A therapy that liberates the immune system to attack cancer cells drove Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) into complete or partial remission in fully 87 percent of patients with resistant forms of the disease who participated in an early-phase clinical trial, Harvard Medical School investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and partnering institutions report in a study published in theNew England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) in San Francisco.

The results provide some of the most dramatic evidence to date of the potential of therapies that increase the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells. While clinical trials of such immunotherapies in other cancers have shown them to be highly effective in a subgroup of patients, the new study stands out because nearly all patients benefited from the treatment.

The success of the agent, nivolumab, in this study has prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate it a “breakthrough therapy” for treating relapsed HL, and a large, multinational Phase 2 trial is now under way.

“What makes these results especially encouraging is that they were achieved in patients who had exhausted other treatment options,” said the study’s co-senior author Margaret Shipp, HMS professor of medicine and chief of Division of Hematologic Neoplasia at Dana-Farber. “We’re also excited by the duration of responses to the drug: The majority of patients who had a response are still doing well more than a year after their treatment.”

More here.