This groundbreaking treatment could be the secret to beating cancer
Eight years ago David Gobin was suffering from stage 4 lung cancer. It swiftly spread to lymph nodes on the right side of his body and in his liver. Two surgeries, two clinical trials, sessions of chemotherapy and radiation blasts failed to slow the disease; doctors said there was a 10 percent chance he would not see another Christmas.
Clearly, the retired Baltimore police officer needed a miracle. It came in the form of a groundbreaking treatment called immunotherapy, which, rather than attacking cancer cells, amps up the immune system.
“I thought I was a guinea pig,” Gobin, now 66, tells The Post. “But what was the worst it could do, kill me? .?.?. If it gave me another six months [of life], I would have been happy.”
As it turned out, immunotherapy did more than that. His cancer has been stable — meaning it has ceased growing or spreading, thanks to his T cells keeping it in check — for three years.
Immunotherapy has helped David Gobin in his battle against lung cancer.
Gobin shared his story last week at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, home to the new Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Though immunotherapy’s been used as a form of treatment for eight years, its latest incarnation has been able to attack cancer on multiple levels.
Just five years ago, says institute director Dr. Drew Pardoll, this method of treating cancer was deemed too experimental to be taken seriously. Back in 2011, less than 1 percent of lung-cancer patients in the United States received immunotherapy — that number is now 25 percent. Within one year, Pardoll predicts, it will exceed 50 percent.
These days, Pardoll believes, immunotherapy looks like the best and least damaging way to fight cancer. If chemotherapy acts like an atomic bomb, complete with collateral damage — killing both cancerous and healthy cells alike — immunotherapy is more like a digital hack.
“It’s aimed not at cancer but at the immune system,” Pardoll explains.
What makes cancer so difficult to treat, he says, is that it locks up the body’s immune system and prevents it from fighting back.
By analyzing biopsies of each patient’s tumors, Pardoll and his team derive a customized formula for unlocking each patient’s immune system, allowing it to regain control and strike down cancer cells.
Treatment requires a two-hour IV infusion every two weeks for anywhere from six months to two years, plus a “treatment vaccine” that may be administered periodically to rev up the immune system. So far, Pardoll says, only 3 percent of his patients have experienced any side effects, such as inflammation of the lungs.
Antibodies like the immunoglobulin G molecule (right) are being used in immunotherapy, a cancer treatment that was experimental just a few years ago.Photo: Alfred Pasieka/ Science Photo Library
Pardoll says doctors are targeting an encyclopedic range of cancers: gastrointestinal, colon, kidney, melanoma, lung, head, neck, breast, ovarian, bladder and uterine.
On the other hand, Pardoll says, prostate and pancreatic cancers have proved more resistant and less receptive to treatment.
Since immunotherapy’s still relatively new, outcomes vary and long-term results are impossible to gauge, Pardoll says, but he believes patients respond best when immunotherapies are administered early on, before their bodies get too beaten up by chemo and radiation.
“In melanoma patients, when immunotherapy treatment is given upfront, tumor shrinkage of 50 percent or greater occurs in ? to ½ of patients,” he says. “The survival rate of one year is 70 percent.” By comparison, when chemo is used for treating melanoma, he says, ? of patients respond, but almost all relapse within six months.
“If you have disease stabilization with immunotherapy, it lasts years,” says Pardoll. “It’s still early [in tracking results], so we haven’t had enough time to follow patients to see if it lasts for the rest of their lives, but we have seen years of survival with good qualities of life.”
Pardoll and his colleagues work with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, sometimes coming up with solutions big pharma would deem too costly and too time-consuming to pursue. A gift of $125 million — mostly from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and fashion mogul and film producer Sidney Kimmel — makes this sort of shot-in-the-dark research all the more viable, Pardoll says. The institute patents its research, and licenses it to drug makers.
“[It’s as if] we do the prototype and they make the final version of the Ferrari,” says Pardoll.
Within the next 10 years, Pardoll hopes to develop a vaccine that protects people who seem to be at high risk for getting cancer — before the disease hits. He also anticipates immunotherapy treatments that can combat cancer in all of its forms.
“Everybody dies of something,” he says. “But we want it to not be the cancer you got at 54. If your immune system can keep cancer in check for 30 years, we’ll take that. And in case we don’t get all the cancers [under control] in 10 years, we are not retiring.”
