This has been a very popular article with many Blog sites. And rightfully so!
I will put it into my own words for you to read in case you missed several months ago.

It seems that the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota were treating a couple of men with a new drug that had inoperable prostate cancer. The two patients had such dramatic recoveries after receiving one dose of this experimental drug that it created much excitement among cancer specialists.

The results were so startling that their doctors said their progress had exceeded all expectations and Dr Eugene Kwon, the urologist who was in charge of their treatment, compared the results to the first pilot breaking the sound barrier.

“This is one of the Holy Grails of prostate cancer research. We have been looking for this for years,” he said.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and here in the US we have the highest incidence of the disease.

The two patients were a part of a larger study and were diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer when they sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

They were told the disease had spread beyond the prostate. One of the men’s cancer was encroaching on the abdomen and the tumor in the other patient had grown to the size of a golf ball.

” Patients in such condition are told they may have only months to live, and are normally only offered palliative care. But after one infusion of the drug ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody that stimulates the immune system, given with conventional hormone therapy, their tumours shrank enough to be surgically removed. Both men have since made a full recovery and returned to their businesses.”

Dr Kwon said yesterday: “Halfway through the trial we began seeing remarkable responses. Some patients had dramatic shrinkage of their tumours so practically all traces had disappeared. We had thought we might get some incremental delay in the progression of the cancer. It had not dawned on us that we might go from an inoperable tumour to an operable one. That just doesn’t happen.”

Michael Blute, the surgeon who operated on one of the patients, said at one point doctors feared they might have the wrong patient: “I was cutting away scar tissue trying to find cancer cells. The pathologist was checking samples as we proceeded and sent word back asking if we had the right patient. He had a hard time finding any cancer. I have never seen anything like this before. The pathologists were floored.”

“But caution is needed, as earlier trials with this drug in other types of cancer were less successful than reported here, and its true value can only become clear through large-scale, randomised clinical trials, two of which are already under way. The other cautionary note is that both men received hormone therapy, which in some instances causes dramatic reductions in tumour size by itself.”

Ipilimumab: How it works

*Ipilimumab is one of a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies, which stimulate the body’s own immune system to fight disease. The experimental treatment is being developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Medarex, a US biotech company. The drug is being trialled on malignant melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, Hodgkin’s disease, lung cancer and prostate cancer. Studies are most advanced in melanoma, where it has been shown to prolong survival in patients with advanced forms of the disease. In the Mayo Clinic study of prostate cancer, researchers say that standard hormone treatment ignited the immune response, and adding ipilimumab was like “pouring gasoline on the pilot light”.

You can find more here

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