Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear

Posted by marc__1 9/9/2025

Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear(www.rockefeller.edu)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153561082...

482 points | 92 commentspage 2

searine 9/10/2025|

Funded primarily by US taxpayers via 6 NIH grants from the National Cancer Institute and NCATS, with additional support from private foundations including the Robertson Fund, V Foundation for Cancer Research, Breast Cancer Alliance, and Beckman Foundation.

D-Coder 9/12/2025|

> Funded primarily by US taxpayers via 6 NIH grants from the National Cancer Institute and NCATS

Well, that will be fixed soon. Think of the billionaires!

pcmaffey 9/10/2025||

The day after tomorrow I am driving 12 hours across three states to get my dog the second shot of his immunotherapy treatment for hemangiosarcoma. It’s only available in trial (this is a yale study). Results for him are too early, but the standard prognosis with chemo is 3-6 months.

This feels like we are on the cusp of profound medical breakthroughs treatment of cancer. My thanks to everyone who contributes to this kind of medical and scientific progress.

hinkley 9/10/2025||

Just remember that you could be at risk for three kinds of cancer. Cancer is the thing that will get you if nothing else does.

And then there are the cancers that are truly unfair. That try to jump the line. Go after kids, mothers, professional athletes. If we can fix those, our relationship with cancer will change. Hope those are the ones we can fix first. Or best.

chrisweekly 9/10/2025||

why professional athletes?

jtoberon 9/10/2025|||

Presumably because they're otherwise very healthy.

ReptileMan 9/10/2025||

They are rarely at peak healthy. They are just in peak physical shape.

Depending on the sport - strain on muscles, joints, heart

Hisoka 9/10/2025||

[dead]

chrisweekly 9/10/2025||||

(clarifying my earlier Q, addressed to hinckley)

"..cancers that are truly unfair. That try to jump the line. Go after kids, mothers, professional athletes"

Why group athletes with kids and mothers as "unfair" victims of cancer?

ang_cire 9/10/2025|||

Higher sun exposure, extended exposure to chemicals like pesticides on fields, lots and lots of reasons beyond what most people assume (steroid/ PED use).

hinkley 9/10/2025||

Those tend to be the ones that “get you” at an older age.

I’m sure there are going to be a lot of retired athletes interested in the metastatic melanoma results here of course, but bone or testicular/ovarian cancer hitting 25 year olds (eg, Lance Armstrong) is just kinda brutal.

And childhood leukemia is the biggest dick of them all.

robotresearcher 9/10/2025||

My wife had Crohn's disease since a teenager, and was diagnosed with metastatic gallbladder cancer aged 52. A death sentence. She chose to do aggressive chemo to prolong her life from a few weeks to a few months. She suffered a great deal before she died.

An immunotherapy treatment was discussed, and it could possibly have helped a lot, but it carried a somewhat high risk of causing a disastrous Crohn's flare that would kill her immediately. The doctor was unwilling to try this because it might kill her. So she died inevitably without it.

It was a classic medical ethics case right there in our crisis. We did a lot of interesting and intense things in those months before she died. Fuck.

southernplaces7 9/10/2025||

>An immunotherapy treatment was discussed, and it could possibly have helped a lot, but it carried a somewhat high risk of causing a disastrous Crohn's flare

I'm really sorry to hear about it playing out that way man. What a horrible dilemma to have to be in. Also, want to ask because I have a few people close to me with Crohns: Obviously there's a lot of nuance and detail in this kind of combination of two illnesses and a specific, very complex medicine, but would you mind sharing a bit more detail of why the immunotherapy was so risky for such a deadly flare? I know immunotherapies are sometimes used to even treat autoimmune diseases, so I'm very curious for this reason too.

matheweis 9/10/2025||

The problem is that the cancerous cells are themselves descended from healthy cells; other than the small differences that make them cancerous, they are in fact the same thing.

Many of the cutting edge immunotherapies for cancer essentially teach the immune system to target the cancerous cells.

However, in combination with an autoimmune disease like Chrons where the immune system has already learned to react to healthy cells, there is a much higher chance that an immunotherapy intended to target only cancerous cells also causes the immune system to target more healthy cells.

robotresearcher 9/10/2025||

Yes, exactly. The specific risk for Crohn's is that the amped up immune system will rapidly kill ALL the gut cells that they've been pissed about for decades.

For the unfamiliar: Crohn's is to guts what eczema is to skin. They are both autoimmune diseases where the immune system attacks a specific kind of healthy cell. Unhelpful.

m_fayer 9/10/2025||

It sounds like the most vicious possible dilemma to find yourself in. Cancer treatment has a way of doing that. I’m very sorry for your loss.

duffpkg 9/10/2025||

One of the hugely important takeaways of this study is that even though the therapy was applied at the site of the most significant tumor, the immune response appeared to trigger against presumably ALL tumors throughout the body.

hinkley 9/10/2025|

Is that worrisome if they thought they could control bad consequences by keeping the treatment hyperlocal?

unsupp0rted 9/9/2025||

> “The melanoma patient had dozens of metastatic tumors on her leg and foot, and we injected just one tumor up on her thigh,” Ravetch says. “After multiple injections of that one tumor, all the other tumors disappeared. The same thing happened in the patient with metastatic breast cancer, who also had tumors in her skin, liver, and lung. And even though we only injected the skin tumor, we saw all the tumors disappear.”

poszlem 9/9/2025||

Bring it faster, I beg you.

tldrthelaw 9/9/2025|

Defunding NIH and gutting the public research pipeline, best we can do.

tombert 9/10/2025|||

I am very much against the defunding of the NIH and CDC and I think RFK Jr is a very dumb person who is the worst person on earth to put in a position like that.

That said, fortunately the US is not the only place on earth that smart people can work on medicine. It’s frustrating to me as an American to see the republicans so ecstatic to force a brain drain, but these researchers didn’t suddenly lose their knowledge, they’ll likely just move somewhere else and this research can keep going.

jeroenhd 9/10/2025||

Of course science can happen elsewhere, but science is struggling to get enough funding already. With a major rich country pulling funds, cancer research worldwide is affected.

This particular study was funded in part by an NIH grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3JOZ-0aY0EOBJOb7uLdbzA/proje... and https://reporter.nih.gov/search/3_aBusrtpki2R0Moj7ntjg/proje...

Part of the research was also funded by this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/lW12o2Q2CEe6M9PKMITWWQ/proje... and seemingly this grant: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/gjjBtikE4Uuyy875NUyiog/proje...

I count $3,043,276 in funding from the first NIH grant plus $10,515,749 from the second. I don't know how where the funds for the "Robertson Therapeutic Development Fund Early Clinical Development Award" and "The V Foundation for Cancer Research" came from and how much of the broader grants were spent on this research, but this particular research seems to have been funded mostly by the USA.

wileydragonfly 9/10/2025|||

Ha. Living this. :(

SilentM68 9/9/2025||

This is a good development. Who's going to have access to this medication if it comes to market? Will it be for the wealthy or will the poor have access to it?

mc32 9/9/2025||

Some of it depends on the cost of manufacture. If it’s tailored to each individual and scaling it is difficult but the drug is effective then it’d likely be costly. If scalability is easy then it’ll be relatively affordable.

MostlyStable 9/9/2025||

As with almost everything: first one, then the other.

unglaublich 9/10/2025||

If all tumors would randomly grow or shrink, then half of the tumors will shrink indeed.

gus_massa 9/10/2025|

They usually grow :( . Anyway, this is only a phase 1 trial, that is designed to test if the new proposed drug is safe and check the safe dose range. In later trials there is a control group that is important to check how often there are weird cases where the tumors mysteriously shrink. (For example, bad measurement methods, diet change, leftover cure from a previous treatment, a lucky mutation, divine intervention, whatever, a double blind randomized controlled group include all those cases.)

MotiBanana 9/10/2025|

My mother is currently battling stage 4 GBM. We are trying out a an immunotherapy vaccine developed Germany. It's still in trials and doesn't cure anything, but if it prolongs her life that would be the best case scenario, so we took the chance.

Really hoping to see a breakthrough in immunotherapy drugs in the next few years.

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