Road to game-changing cancer treatment
Health Road to game-changing cancer treatment HMS Staff July 21, 2025 2 min read The recent development of cancer immunotherapies marks a turning point in the centuries-old quest to fight cancer by harnessing the power of patients’ own immune systems Today, immune checkpoint inhibitors — a type of immunotherapy — have been approved for more than 25 types of cancer. For advanced melanoma, in particular, outcomes have been astounding. Just 15 years ago, only 1 in 20 patients with metastatic skin cancer would survive for five years. Today, advanced melanoma patients treated with a combination of immunotherapies have a 10-year survival rate of 50 percent or higher. These advances build on decades of research across multiple institutions and continue as researchers work to refine these therapies by targeting the unique features of each patient’s tumor and immune system and engineering smarter immune cells that can adapt and persist in the body. This is just one example of the building-block process of work...