The combined use of two immunotherapy drugs has again been shown to be a powerful force against cancer.
Professor John Wagstaff and his team at Swansea University Medical School have repeated some research first done by Dr. James Larkin at the Royal Marsden, but this time with Kidney cancer, a disease with ’few effective treatment options’. 12,000 people a year develop kidney cancer in the UK and a third die.
The drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab are being used in the clinical trial, and the results compared with the benefits obtained by using a drug Sunitinib. After just four months the researchers are reporting that 40 per cent of the patients on the double hit treatment are seeing their tumours shrink, with 10 per cent showing the tumours completely disappearing. The trial is ongoing.
CANCERactive has previously reported on the same combination of these two immunotherapy drugs used in clinical trials in the USA with Melanoma.
Chris Woollams, founder of CANCERactive and a former Oxford University Biochemist said, “These results are considerably better that standard drug performances for kidney cancer. What is also interesting is the work we covered from Chicago Medical School and Lille Medical School that immunotherapy works even better if you take probiotic supplements at the same time. They too boost the immune system. In fact there is a growing volume of research that shows cancer drugs in general work better if you take probiotics with them”.
Go To: CANCERactive Immunotherapy review