Immune-boosting drug shows promise against lung cancer

Cancer has one less place to hide. A drug that stops tumours camouflaging themselves from the immune system appears to significantly boost survival rates in people with a form of lung cancer that is almost incurable unless removed surgically before it spreads.

Some people who received the drug have seen their tumours disappear completely.

Lung cancer is the world's most deadly cancer, killing over 4000 people a day worldwide. Only 15 per cent of those diagnosed survive for five years or more, compared with 89 per cent of those with breast cancer.

Many common cancers evade detection by silencing part of the immune system. Rather than targeting tumours by destroying them through radiation or chemotherapy, it might be possible to treat them by finding ways to reactivate the immune system so it will destroy cancer cells itself.

A drug designed to do this, nivolumab, has now been tested in 129 people for whom other treatments had already failed. The group had non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) – the most common form of the disease, accounting for 85 per cent of all cases. Participants received either 1, 3, or 10 milligrams of nivolumab per kilogram of bodyweight daily for up to 96 months.

One way that cancer cells evade the immune system is by interacting with a molecule on the surface of white blood cells called PD-1. Nivolumab blocks PD-1 so tumour cells can't interact with it. This reawakens the immune system, allowing it to attack the cancer.

The two-year survival rate of the group on nivolumab was more than double that in a group given standard therapies. "We found 1 in 4 patients alive at two years, compared with 1 in 10 for conventional chemotherapy," says Michael Giordano, head of oncology development at Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company behind nivolumab.