Immunotherapy’s cancer remit widens - Combination therapies hold great promise, but at what cost?

Nature News ^ | 28 May 2013 | Heidi Ledford

[neverdem]

Drugs that unleash the power of the immune system on cancers are generating considerable optimism in industry, but still Andrew Baum thinks analysts are selling them short. In a 22 May report, Baum, the London-based head of global health-care research at the investment bank Citi, forecasts that in ten years the drugs will be treating 60% of cancers and earning US$35 billion a year.

Three elements contribute to his bullishness: the drugs are showing signs of wider effectiveness; many patients will take them for years; and the prices are stratospheric (see ‘Stiff medicine’).

One of the first such drugs to be approved, Yervoy (ipilimumab), costs about $40,000 per month in the United States, and £15,000 ($23,000) in the United Kingdom, where health-care officials negotiated a lower price. So far, expensive immunotherapies have been approved only for treating melanoma and prostate cancer. But this weekend, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, Illinois, investigators will present promising results from trials that indicate that immunotherapies could soon have a role in treating cancers of the lung, kidney and stomach.

A new strategy will add to the costs: regimens that combine the drugs with radiation therapy, genetically targeted drugs and other immunotherapies. The hope is that these other treatments will enhance the ability of the immune system to recognize the tumour, either by further stimulating the immune system, or by damaging the tumour so as to release antigens that the immune system recognizes.

Yervoy, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, headquartered in New York, is remarkable because a three-month course can send cancer into remission for years (see go.nature.com/k1e3m2). However, only about one-quarter of patients with advanced melanoma responds to the drug, which spurs tumour-killing T cells into action by blocking an inhibitory signal...

[neverdem]

Russia's AIDS Epidemic: It's America's Fault (of Course)

New 1-step process for designer bacteria

FReepmail me if you want on or off my combined microbiology/immunology ping list.

[melsec]

T-cell virus oh-ooh - Milla Jovovich where are u?

[arthurus]

All these new wonder drugs and treatments in the pipeline will never see the light of day. Obamacare will abort all that because it will not permit such things to be paid for. It is those terribly high prices in the American market for new drugs and treatments that repay the research that develops them. We are paying the costs in America now for the whole world because the rest of the worlds’ governments have limited the prices that the developers can charge so those prices have to be sky high in America until patents run out. All drug development around the world is for the American market for that reason. Obamacare limits the amount of money that can be spent for each patient regardless of affliction. This will end drug research and device development worldwide. That won’t be so terrible for a while- we don’t notice what we don’t have- but eventually the antibiotics will have lost their efficacy and also will not be replaced. Think about that.