Why not Immunotherapy for stage 4 b cancer of base the tongue

mehrdad357

 

Hello,

 

I was recently diagnosed with stag 4b cancer in the base of the tongue. I will see my oncologist for the second time on Mon. 9/12.

he called me Friday morning and told me he'll be using erbitux and 30 sessions of radation therapy. I asked him about phase 3

clincal trials of immunoTherapy, but he told me immunotherapy will not help my cancer. He is good, I don't want to ask him

again tomorrow why immunotherapy will not work, unless there is a good reason for it. Can anyone help me?

 

Thanks a lot

corleone

You should ask why, but here’s my 2 cents

For one thing, immunotherapy is generally reserved for re-occurrences, and when other therapies proved to be no longer effective. When you start treatment for the first time, the “classical” chemo, radiation, +/- surgery, have proved time and time again to be much more effective. Immuno is more experimental (and there are phase I or II studies going on), but seems to be very effective for a low percentage of people (not known exactly beforehand who will respond or not).

 

Other forum members, who already had immunotherapy, might chime in with more details.

CivilMatt

scc. bot

mehrdad357,

There is nothing wrong with trying to improve your immune system and be as strong and healthy as you (practically) can, but the cancer may have already side stepped your defenses and setup shop.

Generally, there are no easy ways to successfully battle and beat cancer.  The tools to fight cancer have been proven to work in many cases, but the trade-offs can be mine numbing.

Reading the posts in this forum is an open book to the realities of cancer and cancer treatments.  All decisions concerning what to do will be made by you (we all had to) and most  of us wanted to get it right.

Immunotherapy is great if your cancer has been designated as receptive to treatment.  Though the side effects are most likely “not worse” they do exist.  Maybe a multi-path approach is in the cards.

I wish you luck, learn a lot, squeeze the honesty out of your doctors, play to win , don’t over think, take a friend with you and move forward.

Matt

 

phrannie51

What Corleone said....

The new immunotherapy drugs are being used for recurrences because other chemo's don't work....and so far only certain people seem to benefit from them....the cancer might be SCC, and tho Keytruda has been approved for use for HNC....it doesn't work on everybody....some people seem to respond completely to the treatment while others don't get anything out of it.  That kind of tells me that how well immune drugs work is specific to individual immune systems, and not the cancer itself...They don't really know what it is that makes it effective for some folks. 

Erbitux and rads has proven itself as effective for first time cancer....I'd trust it.

p

Laralyn

I'm in an immunotherapy

I'm in an immunotherapy clinical trial right now. I believe the only type of cancer for which immunotherapy is approved for first-line treatment is melanoma. For all other cancers, it's second-line or even still unapproved and only available in clinical trials. It looks like it's getting close with lung cancer but as of right now, even approval as a second-line treatment for head and neck cancer is very new.

In order to be considered for a first-line treatment, it has to have a provably better survival rate than the current first-line treatments (chemo-radiation). Especially for HPV+ patients, chemo-radiation is very effective and has a comparatively high cure rate. The top immunotherapy drugs have a success rate of 15-20%, much lower than the success rate of chemo-radiation... at least when used alone. Combination trials raise that effectiveness a bit but still not to the level that they are better than chemo-radiation.

I do believe immunotherapy is the future for cancer treatments, but we're unfortunately not there quite yet.

donfoo

agree - promising but not yet

During my recent visit to my surgeon, he mentioned just returning from a HNC conference. There is a lot of buzz about immunotherapy but he said there is nothing available as yet for HNC, same status as what Laralyn thinks. Given the increased pace of research, technologies, and discoveries, more cures are coming soon.