Salinas, CA Caregivers For Hodgkin's Disease, Lung Cancer & Kidney Cancer Patients Have Hope : A New Class Of Drugs Called PD-1 Inhibitors Show Hope
by Richard Kuehn on 12/13/14
A class of drugs called PD-1 inhibitors are showing extreme promise in fighting Hodgkin’s Disease, a debilitating condition that strikes almost 10,000 people per year. The drugs free the body’s immune system to fight cancer and have shown that they shrink cancer in over half of the patients on the drugs, and these are people that have exhausted many other treatment options. What’s exciting about this new class of drugs is that researchers believe they may also work on lung, kidney and some other types of cancers. Although the trials thus far have been small, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, participants were excited about the potential for this class of drugs. About 30% of those treated for Hodgkin’s disease either do not respond to current treatments or do initially but then relapse.
