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Comment by duban | Hacker News Reader

Immunotherapy saved my life, but sadly also made me an insulin dependent type 1 diabetic. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10083744 for more info about this side effect)

I think immunotherapy is great and going to save many lives, but there are still some things that need to be worked out before it's perfect.

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Cancer really sucks like that. A lot the treatments definitely keep you alive and even cure you but leave you with nasty side effects. Oncologists measure changes in Quality of Life (QoL). When you have some kpi that attempts to model something as subjective as your quality of life you know it's quite bad already.

Of course on a completely different level, but I think this will be similar to how e.g. antibiotics or biologics have played out. First generation has awful side effects as researchers focus on getting anything to work at all. Then once a certain baseline of efficacy is reached, they can focus on reducing side effects.

Yep, it wrecked my friend's thyroid and adrenals. I don't know what the drug was, but it was immunotherapy for stage iv melanoma.

opdualag? I know someone who took it with lasting side effects.

There's a bunch of different immuno types for melanoma (and other cancers). That one is a combo of nivolumab (aka Opdivo) and relatlimab.

Nivo is used a lot for melanoma, also commonly in combo with ipi (ipilimumab, yervoy). Pembro (keytruda) is the other common one.

Anyway, any of these can have adverse effects so patients are closely monitored.

For me, my thyroid didn't like nivo much but recovered. But we stopped after a couple of cycles of ipi+nivo because I was starting to develop colitis. And more importantly it wasn't slowing development of my melanomas.

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