The four women had an extremely rare, aggressive and fatal form of ovarian cancer. There was no standard treatment. All four women, who lived in different countries, asked their doctors to try new immunotherapy drugs that had revolutionized the treatment of cancer. But all four of them were told that drugs were out of the question and that they wouldn’t work against ovarian cancer. But it looks like the doctors were wrong. According to The New York Times, the women managed to get immunotherapy and their cancers went into remission. These stories have confused scientists, who are trying to figure out why the drugs worked when they should not have. If they can figure out how this happened, they may have opened the door to new treatments for a wide variety of other cancers thought not to respond to immunotherapy. Though four women do not constitute a clinical trial, it “it is the exceptions that give you the best insights,” said Dr. Drew Pardoll, who directs the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, according to The Times. The idea behind immunotherapy is to get rid of a molecular shield that some tumors use to avoid an attack by the body’s white blood cells. Immunotherapy drugs attack that shield and pierce it, allowing the immune system to recognize and demolish tumor cells. But until now, the new drugs have not worked against many common cancers. At Johns Hopkins, researchers are looking to start a trial to learn more.
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