Immunotherapy... game changer for treatment of cancer

[davidst01]

Does anyone know if any of the big hospitals in Bangkok offer Immunotherapy i.e. Nivolumab. The NHS in the Uk recently rejected it bc its around 5k a month to treat. 

 

cheers

 

''Professor Kevin Harrington, lead researcher from the ICR and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London said: 'Our research has found nivolumab really is a game-changing treatment for patients with head and neck cancer.

'Not only does it extend survival – we have now shown that patients feel much better in the extra time that the drug grants them.

'When immunotherapies first hit the clinic, there were concerns over side effects and the fact that they didn't work for everyone. But in only two or three years we have become very good at managing the side effects they cause, and we are better able to select patients in whom these treatments are most likely to be effective.'

ICR chief executive Professor Paul Workman said: 'Creating cancer treatments that can not only extend life but also minimise the impact of the disease on patients' lives is a major aim of researchers.

'So it's great news that this trial has found that, as nivolumab greatly extends life among these patients, it also gives marked improvements in quality of life compared with current treatment options.

'I hope that this drug will be now approved very soon for use on the NHS.' Immunotherapy is a relatively new treatment which doctors only started using six or seven years ago. It has already shown huge promise for forms of cancer that are difficult to treat.

Some skin cancer patients who were told they had only a few months left have since returned to work and resumed normal lives after tumours shrunk.

Sunday Times journalist AA Gill, who died of lung cancer last December, wrote that he might have lived longer had he received nivolumab – which he called the weapon of choice for 'every oncologist in the first world''

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4634534/NHS-approve-cancer-drug-avoids-pain-chemotherapy.html#ixzz4kuAkp5rS 
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[Sheryl]

Yes, they have it.

 

Wattanaosth Hospital (Bangkok Hospital's Cancer hospital) does and I expect the other big ones do as well.

 

However what you have written is a bit misleading. This drug is not effective for all, or even most, cancers.  It is used only for certain specific cancers, mainly melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer and more recently some studies have shown it useful in advanced liver cancer.

 

It is also not curative. It just prolongs survival and is used in patients whose cancers have metastasized and are thus not curable.

 

That said, it is an improvement over what was previously available,  both in terms of effectivness and side effects.

 

TherE are other targetedfor other types of cancer available here as well (though not for all cancers, some do not as yet have a targeted therapy available). Some  (but not nivolumab) are available free of charge to people below a certain income level, e.g imatinib  for some types of leukemia.

 

[bazza73]

As far as I am aware, the only proven immunotherapy in existence is the BCG treatment for bladder cancer, where it produces about 95% remission. That's not to say immunotherapy won't eventually be successful in treating other cancers, it's just the mechanisms are still not fully understood.

[Sheryl]

There are other immunotherapies that are proven to prolong survival in some cancers, but they are not curative.