I noticed that nowhere in the article do they give an actual life expectancy expressed in number of years.
My wife has been getting immunotherapy for a cancer in her lungs for 3 and 1/2 years now. The doctor told her the clinical trials only went for 2 years. She is in Uncharted Territory, but he said that he will give her the immunotherapy indefinitely as long as it is helping her.
The main concern in the article appears to be the increased cost to the Healthcare System. My main concern is my wife’s increased lifespan.
In both sets of people in the study, the cancer was shown to be stopped.
There is nothing wrong with restarting therapy if a future test or scan shows a change.
Grade 3 or worse issues definitely happened a lot more with unlimited antibody use.
As a cancer survivor and as someone who works in the pharmaceutical industry, I understand your concern. Immunotherapies work so differently than traditional chemotherapy however, so I think how long to keep someone on an immunotherapy drug is a reasonable question. I think as long as there's an opportunity to return for follow-up treatments should the cancer reappear, it would be OK to end current treatments. That's just my opinion as an outsider though, and I'm NOT a medical doctor.
To your point about your wife's clinical trial, it's not an uncommon scenario at all. When planning clinical trials, you must have some kind of end of trial date in mind. With oncology trials however, it would be unethical to pull someone off a trial where the drug was having a positive effect on a patient. I've seen patients receiving oncology drugs even 4 -5 years after the end of the trial (which means the pharma company has to continue to make and provide that drug, even if the drug was never approved or pursued into commercialization.)