Immunotherapy Is The Hottest Trend In Cancer Treatment — So What Exactly Is It?
The Washington Post offers a look at the basics of the treatment that has everyone from patients to investors to pharmaceutical companies paying attention.
The Washington Post:
Cancer Immunotherapy Is Moving Fast. Here’s What You Need To Know.
The idea of using the body's immune system to fight cancer has been around for a century, but only in the past half a dozen years have dramatic breakthroughs begun rocking the medical world. "That's when the tsunami came," says Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, and those advances are spawning hundreds of clinical trials nationwide, plus generating intense interest from patients, physicians and investors. (McGinley, 9/28)
In other news, sometimes, when it comes to the technology to diagnose cancer, cheaper is actually better —
The Washington Post:
Ask A MacArthur Genius: Just How Cheap Can Cancer Diagnosis Get?
What’s the best way to bring cutting-edge healthcare to the world’s poorest places? It can be tempting to export money and equipment to solve the problem. But when bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum visits hospitals in places such as Malawi and El Salvador, she sees the unintended consequence of that charitable impulse. “Ironically, if you walk down the hall or into the basement of a hospital, there’s always a big room that is just for broken, donated equipment,” she says. (Blakemore, 9/28)