Cancer Symptoms & Cure: Immunotherapy Drugs Combo Might Be More Effective Skin Cancer Treatment Than Chemotherapy

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An interesting approach of combining two immunotherapy drugs was found to be a more effective skin cancer treatment than chemotherapy, according to new trials led by British scientists.

Immunotherapy, a treatment that uses a substance to stimulate the immune system, could be the new way to treat cancer. In the trials, researchers found that it shrank the tumors in more than half of the patients with advanced skin cancer.

In the cancer treatment trial, more than 900 patients with advanced skin melanoma were given ipilimumab, nivolumab, or a combination of the two. The researchers found that more than half of patients given the combined immunotherapy drugs had significant tumor shrinkage or stability, according to Medical Daily.

The researchers found that more than half of the overall 58 percent of patients who were given the combined immunotherapy drugs had significant tumor shrinkage, according to Medical Daily.

"By giving these drugs together you are effectively taking two brakes off the immune system rather than one so the immune system is able to recognise tumours it wasn't previously recognising and react to that and destroy them," lead researcher Dr. James Larkin, from the Royal Marsden Hospital, told the BBC. "For immunotherapies, we've never seen tumour shrinkage rates over 50% so that's very significant to see."

He added that this approach is "going to have a big future for the treatment of cancer."

The findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and a number of trials were presented at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

"All the early preclinical and clinical work supported the idea that combining these two immunotherapy drugs could result in better outcomes for patients," another lead researcher, Dr. Jedd Wolchok, said, according to Science Daily. "We're encouraged by the progression-free survival data we're currently reporting. It is a testament to how drastically immunotherapy has altered the prognostic landscape for some advanced melanoma patients."

"Just five years ago, many of these patients would have been expected to live for only seven months following diagnosis -- but it's important to remember that overall survival data for this group is not yet available."

However, the treatment had side effects. A third of the patients who were given the drug combination suffered from diarrhea and increased pancreatic lipase, so he treatment was stopped, according to the press release. Only a few patients who received the drugs separately suffered from the side effects.