KSHB 41 reporter Elyse Schoenig covers the cities of Shawnee and Mission. She also focuses on issues surrounding the cost of health care, saving for retirement and personal debt. Share your story idea with Elyse.
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A new phase in a clinical trial for treating certain kinds of tumors with immunotherapy continues to pave the way for the future of treating patients with cancer.
While chemotherapy, radiation and surgeries are common for most cancer treatments, immunotherapy is continuing to allow some patients to forgo these often harsh and invasive methods altogether.
Immunotherapy drugs redirect our immune system to attack cancer cells.
“A lot of people don't realize that we have cancer cells, all of us, that develop on a day-to-day basis, but our immune system is pretty good at finding them and getting rid of them,” said Dr. Marc Roth, medical director of gastrointestinal oncology at St. Luke's in Kansas City. “One of the hallmarks of cancer is that it finds a way to grow around the immune system and form tumors.”
Roth said it’s important to note that immunotherapy doesn’t work for all types of cancer.
According to an NBC News report, immunotherapy drugs work the best for people with tumors that have a certain type of mutation, called a mismatch repair deficiency. This mutation means that when cancer cells replicate, the mistakes in the DNA aren’t fixed.
A clinical trial published in "The New England Journal of Medicine" first treated patients with a certain type of rectal cancer in its Phase 1.
Roth said the results were profound, with 100% of patients' tumors removed without surgery or radiation.
Phase 2, which was just published Sunday, was expanded to patients with other kinds of cancer and focused on those with tumors with the mismatch repair deficiency mutation.
These results were 80% effective in people with the mutation. Roth said it indicates a growing future of treating some cancer patients without chemo and surgery.
“The immunotherapy by itself can be potentially curative,” said Dr. Timothy Pluard, St. Luke’s Cancer Institute medical director. “It’s still a relatively small study; there’s still a lot of work to be done on identifying the appropriate patients, the appropriate markers, to select the patients who could most benefit from this treatment.”
Michael Delaney has been living with a rare cancer known as thymic carcinoma since 2013.
"I was given 12 months, and I've been here for 12 years,” Delaney said.
He's had 28 rounds of radiation, four rounds of chemo, six surgeries and almost 200 rounds of immunotherapy since then. He said it was the immunotherapy clinical trial he traveled to and from Washington, D.C. for in 2015 that changed everything.
Even with all it cost, he said it saved his life.
“It cost me my whole savings, my 401, just to be able to go to that (the D.C. clinical trial) for two years,” he said. "Immunotherapy has really been a miracle drug for at least my cancer, and many other cancers out there."
Delaney’s gotten his immunotherapy treatments at St. Luke's ever since the clinical trial.
"I can fairly confidently say that immunotherapy, by now, has probably been tested in almost every type of cancer, and it has really transformed the way we treat many of them,” Roth said. "The underlying premise of this study is that not all cancers are the same."
Roth said this means genetic testing is crucial because it means cancer patients can know if immunotherapy would work for them.
The progress fills Delaney with hope. So much so, he has his own foundation to support and even help finance patients with the same cancer as him: The Thymic Carcinoma Center.
"People with cancer have to have hope,” Delaney said.
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