What is Advanced Liver Cancer?

 "Immunotherapy is a bit of an umbrella term for many different types of medicine that help the immune system do its job and attack cancer," Marron noted. "For liver cancer — and many other types of cancer — immunotherapies are now the mainstay of treatment for people with advanced disease, meaning for patients in whom surgery is not a potential cure."

New approaches needed to tackle liver cancer

But the trial results so far suggest that the first two sessions of immunotherapy administered before surgery effectively kill off liver cancer tumors in about one-third of patients. And Marron predicts that "nearly all the patients whose cancer was [already] dead when we cut it out will remain cancer-free."

In addition, the team also identified some degree of immunotherapy-triggered benefit among the remaining patients.

Get an overview of the Advanced Liver Cancer Market

But Marron stressed that firm answers as to precisely which liver cancer patients might be ideal immunotherapy candidates — and what might predict long-term remission — awaits completion of his team's ongoing post-surgical analysis.

The study findings were published online recently in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

The impetus behind studies like this is that when it comes to liver cancer treatment, "we need to do better." "If diagnosed with liver cancer at an early stage, the five-year survival rate is 34%," she noted. "If the cancer has spread to surrounding tissues, the five-year survival rate is 12%. If the cancer has spread to a distant part of the body, the five-year survival rate is 3%."

But she said more and bigger studies will be needed to determine how best to design immunotherapy treatment, which patients will truly benefit, and whether the treatment really reduces the risk for recurrence and death.

Foster, however, thinks he already has all the information he needs.

"This was absolutely a no-brainer," he said. "It was worth it. It was worth getting up at 5 o-clock every morning, and driving into the city for two hours. And I would do it again in a heartbeat, if I had to."

There's more about liver cancer and immunotherapy.

Read for more information about the Advanced Liver Cancer Market

Latest Published Reports

Comments