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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

It's not a generic novel treatment against any and all cancers, as much as the headline would lead you to conclude.

You're mostly correct but immunotherapies do work for a many different type of cancer. The issue is differences in tumor biology plays a major factor. The even bigger caveat is that given a sufficient amount of tumor mutational burden (TMB), immunotherapies are found to be effective for any solid tumor. Granted most patients don't have the sky had TMBs needed for it to be effective

It's triple therapy, which most doctors won't do, which I think is one of the future steps to stopping cancer. We should have been looking at combination therapy a long time ago. Hopefully this will get oncologists to push the envelope a bit more.

I thought using multiple therapies for cancer was fairly common, or are you referring specifically to immunotherapies?

Sequentially? Yes. Simultaneously? Rare. Doxorubicin and cisplatin, has been done, but keytruda was quite interesting when it started to do clinical trials in combination with various chemos so that the FDA would approve it. My late-wife's oncologist was hesitant on combining anything, but I kept pushing for pembro plus anything.

But this was also systemically applied, these new ADCs are targeted, much stronger with combination payloads. Sadly, not as effective for harsher cancers like triple-negative BC.

This doesn't track my experience. I have Ewing's Sarcoma, and my first regimen involved 5 agents: Doxorubicin, Vincristine, Cytoxan, Ifofsfomide, and Etoposide. This [1] appears to be the same plan I used. When that failed, I had a second regimen with Vincristine, Irinotecan, and Temozolomide. After that failed, I had Irinotecan and Trabectidin, followed by Doxil, followed by, Cytoxan and Topotecan, followed by high dose Ifofsfomide. So only two of the treatments I received were single agent, but maybe it depends on the cancer.

[1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/drug...

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