Cancer Patients Are Living Longer — A Closer Look at the Treatments Driving This Progress

Researchers attributed targeted immunotherapy treatment for allowing myeloma, a type of blood cancer that develops in the plasma cells in the bone marrow, to see major survival improvements “from 32% in the mid-1990s to 62% in 2015-2021.”

WATCH: Immunotherapy: Fighting Cancer With the Body’s Own Cells

Dr. Steven Rosenberg, Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute and a pioneer in immunotherapy research and treatment, explains that “We actually developed methods for genetically modifying a patient’s own immune cells by putting in genes to cause them to express molecules that would enable them to recognize the cancer in a new way.”

“These are cells that never existed before in the course of evolution. It’s a result of genetic engineering of lymphocytes. We use viruses– a kind of RNA virus called a retrovirus– to introduce genes into a patient’s cells,” Dr. Rosenberg explains.

Targeted therapy is a type of treatment that works by identifying specific markers on tumor cells. These markers allow doctors to target specific cancers with drugs or other treatments designed to attack them. By doing so, they can reduce side effects while increasing efficacy and improving survival rates. If you’re receiving targeted therapy for your lung cancer, this means that your doctor has found targets on the surface of cancer cells or in your tumor.

Targeted therapies and immunotherapies generally fall into two major categories, each designed to attack cancer in a precise way:

• Small molecules: These drugs are tiny enough to slip inside cells, making them ideal for targeting processes that happen within the cell itself.
• Monoclonal antibodies: Lab‑engineered proteins that work outside the cell. Some flag cancer cells so the immune system can destroy them, others block growth signals or trigger cancer cells to self‑destruct. A more advanced version, known as antibody‑drug conjugates, attaches a potent cancer‑killing drug to the antibody so it can deliver treatment directly into the tumor — an area seeing rapid and exciting progress.

RELATED: “Breakthrough” is a film about the life of Dr. Jim Allison and his Nobel Prize-winning work in immunotherapy and its profound impact on reducing cancer mortality.

How Modern Therapies Are Fueling Major Drops in Cancer Mortality

Immune-Based Therapies Making a Difference

CAR T‑cell therapy turns a patient’s own immune cells into highly specialized cancer fighters. It begins with collecting T‑cells — the white blood cells that help the body recognize and destroy threats — through a simple blood draw.

In the lab, scientists use a harmless, inactivated virus to add new genetic instructions that teach these cells to grow special receptors on their surface. Once engineered, the cells are multiplied into the millions and infused back into the patient.

WATCH: The Value of CAR T-Cell Therapy for Patients

Inside the body, these reprogrammed T‑cells act like guided missiles, locking onto matching antigens on cancer cells and attacking them directly.

As Dr. Siddhartha Ganguly, Carol Cockrell Curran Distinguished Centennial Chief in Hematologic Oncology at Houston Methodist Hospital and Neal Cancer Center, explains, “CAR‑T therapy aims to give ‘eyes’ to the T‑cells… This gene allows the T‑cell to ‘see’ the cancer cells… They will seek out the cancer and kill it, much like the video game Pac‑Man.”

The reengineering process is highly personalized. After T‑cells are separated from the blood, they are modified to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) that match a specific protein on the patient’s cancer — for example, CD19 in certain lymphomas. Before the infusion, patients receive chemotherapy to make room in the immune system so the CAR T‑cells can work more effectively.

FDA-approved CAR T‑cell therapies, such as Abecma, Breyanzi, Carvykti, Kymriah, Tecartus, and Yescarta, are now used to treat several blood cancers, including leukemias, lymphomas, and multiple myeloma.

The results have been remarkable. CAR T‑cell therapy has produced response rates as high as 80% in patients whose cancers resisted multiple prior treatments.

In lymphoma, more than half of patients treated with Yescarta achieved a complete response.

“Some of these patients had three, four, or five prior lines of therapy, and we were able to save their lives,” says Dr. Stephen Schuster, director of the Abramson Cancer Center’s lymphoma program.

Dr. Nina Shah, a hematologist with the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, calls the outcomes “really unprecedented… something we had never seen before for patients who have had six or seven prior lines of therapy.”

Like any powerful therapy, CAR T‑cell treatment comes with potential side effects.

It typically does not cause hair loss or nausea, but it can trigger cytokine release syndrome (CRS), a reaction caused by a surge of immune‑signaling proteins. Symptoms can range from fever and chills to low blood pressure.

Neurological changes — such as confusion — can also occur. Fatigue is the most common and usually improves within weeks. “That’s very normal, and it usually resolves in the first month,” Dr. Shah notes.

CRS can occasionally be more serious, causing shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, or dangerously low blood pressure. Scientists still don’t know whether side effects correlate with how well the treatment is working.

WATCH: CAR T-Cell Therapy Side Effects

“Every patient is different, and every patient has a different course,” Dr. Shah emphasizes. Still, many patients report meaningful improvements in pain, fatigue, and emotional well-being after treatment.

Close monitoring is essential after infusion. “They typically have to be monitored very carefully… for a number of weeks or even months,” says Dr. Julie Vose, chief of hematology/oncology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, underscoring the importance of follow-up care as the immune system adjusts to its newly engineered cancer-fighting cells.

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors

Checkpoint inhibitors are a class of immunotherapy drugs that specifically target proteins found either on immune or cancer cells to prevent their binding together.

An important point about checkpoint inhibitors is that they do not kill cancer cells directly; instead, they stimulate the immune system to identify and attack them, while hopefully sparing surrounding healthy cells.

There are three types of immune checkpoint inhibitors, and they all follow the same mechanism of action, with a slight difference in the protein they will block to help boost the immune system to destroy cancer cells.

PD-L1 and PD-1 inhibitors

PD-L1 is a protein found on cancer cells, while PD-1 is a protein found on normal cells. When they bind to each other, the immune system fails to recognize the cancer cell and switches off its defense mechanism, marking the cancer cell as a normal cell.

Antibodies that target PD-L1 on cancer cells play a critical role in preventing the binding between normal and cancer cells (PD-L1 and PD-1), which activates the immune system (specifically T-cells) to recognize the cancer cell and stimulate an immune response.

“The cancer cells are so smart that they understand that our immune system cells have brakes on them,” Dr. Mohamed Mohamed, a thoracic medical oncologist at Cone Health Cancer Center in Greensboro, explains to SurvivorNet.

“The cancer cells secrete a protein called PD-L1 or PD-L2 to go and attach to [those] brakes. They, therefore, stop the immune cells from attacking the cancer.”

Some PD-1/PD-L1 Inhibitors may include:

• atezolizumab (Tecentriq®)
• cemiplimab (Libtayo®)
• durvalumab (Imfinzi®)
• nivolumab (Opdivo®)
• pembrolizumab (Keytruda®)
• CTLA-4 inhibitors
  • Similarly, CTLA-4 is an immune checkpoint found on T-cells, so by inhibiting the binding process, it switches on the immune system to find and attack cancer cells.
• LAG-3 inhibitors
  • LAG-3 is also an immune checkpoint found on immune cells that switches on the immune system by inhibiting its interaction with cancer cells. Relatlimab is a checkpoint inhibitor that functions in this process. It has been validated for the treatment of melanoma.

The FDA has approved several checkpoint inhibitors to treat 12 types of cancers. These cancers include:

• Lung cancer
• Liver cancer
• Bladder cancer
• Breast cancer
• Skin cancer
• Cervical cancer
• Colon and rectal cancer
• Head and neck cancer
• Kidney cancer
• Stomach cancer
• Hodgkin lymphoma

Targeted Therapies Offer More Precise Ways to Attack Tumors

Biomarker testing — which reveals the genetic, molecular, and protein features that shape how a cancer behaves — has quickly become a foundation of modern oncology, transforming how doctors diagnose disease and tailor treatment. By pinpointing the specific markers driving a tumor’s growth, clinicians can design more personalized treatment plans that are often more effective and less toxic.

“Nowadays, with not only brain cancers, but cancers in general, there has been a lot that’s been discovered about how different mutations in the tumor actually affect the behavior. Also, there are a number of mutations for which we have drugs that can target those mutations,” Dr. David Peereboom, an oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center in Ohio, tells SurvivorNet.

WATCH: A Promising Targeted Therapy For Low-Grade Gliomas

This type of testing is also what makes targeted therapy possible. When a tumor carries a mutation that can be acted on, doctors can match patients with drugs designed to home in on that exact abnormality. One powerful example is vorasidenib (Voranigo), an FDA-approved targeted therapy for certain glioma patients.

Gliomas, the most common adult brain tumors, frequently carry mutations in the IDH gene — a change that influences how the tumor grows and spreads. To determine whether a patient may benefit from IDH‑targeted drugs, doctors rely on molecular testing, which analyzes tumor tissue (or sometimes blood) to identify these mutations. Techniques such as antibody staining and molecular sequencing help pathologists confirm the presence of an IDH mutation.

Several molecular testing techniques are used on tissue samples. One method is antibody staining, where pathologists “stain the tumor with an antibody to look for the presence of the IDH mutant protein,”  Dr. Alexandra Miller, Director of the Neuro-Oncology Division at NYU Langone Health, explains.

WATCH: Vorasidenib for IDH Mutant Gliomas

Experts describe biomarkers as a tumor’s “fingerprints,” offering clues about which treatments are likely to work best. Next‑generation sequencing, a widely used testing method, scans tumor DNA for abnormalities — including “driver mutations” that fuel cancer growth and can be targeted with specific therapies.

WATCH: Understanding Molecular Testing for Glioma

For glioma patients with IDH‑mutant tumors, this precision approach has opened the door to major advances. Vorasidenib, which has shown striking results: in the Phase 3 INDIGO trial, it reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 61% and extended progression‑free survival from 11.1 to 27.7 months. For many patients, that represents a meaningful shift in what their future can look like.

Newer Combination Therapies Offering Hope to Patients

Combination therapies, where different treatments are used together to combat the cancer, are making a difference in many patients’ lives, especially in recent years. Among metastatic prostate cancer patients, for example, the current standard of care now embraces a combination approach, pairing traditional hormone therapy (also called androgen deprivation therapy or ADT) with additional targeted treatments to enhance outcomes and extend survival.

WATCH: Combination Therapy: Elevating the Standard for Metastatic Prostate Cancer Care

“Ultimately, what is now the current standard practice for the vast majority of patients with metastatic prostate cancer is the use of what we call combination approaches of androgen deprivation therapy,” Dr. Vivek Narayan, a medical oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tells SurvivorNet.

According to Dr. Narayan, four combination agents have shown strong clinical results when added to androgen deprivation therapy.

These include:

• Abiraterone: A hormone therapy that reduces testosterone production, often prescribed alongside prednisone, a steroid that helps manage treatment-related side effects.
• Enzalutamide: An oral anti-androgen that blocks the effects of testosterone, commonly used in advanced prostate cancer treatment.
• Apalutamide: Approved for metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer, this medication disrupts androgen signaling to slow cancer growth.
• Darolutamide: A next-generation hormone therapy that prevents testosterone from binding to prostate cancer cells, helping to control disease progression.

“There’s a lot of dealer’s choice… But what’s critical to me is not necessarily the drug that’s being chosen, but that it’s just being utilized in that early treatment setting,” Dr. Narayan explains.

While each drug has nuances — pill burden, dosing frequency, potential side effects — the overall efficacy across this group is considered highly comparable.

Effective Vaccines Helping Prevent Cancer

As medical advancements continue to improve the quality of life among patients, they have also helped prevent more patients from joining the ranks. A vaccine that has proven effective is the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which is helping reduce cancer risk.

HPV is “a group of more than 200 related viruses, some of which are spread through vaginal, anal, or oral sex,” according to the National Cancer Institute. While many sexually active individuals will contract HPV at some point in their lives, the virus is linked to several serious cancers.

Though HPV is most commonly associated with cervical cancer, its reach extends far beyond. The virus is also known to cause cancers of the throat, vagina, penis, anus, and vulva. In fact, HPV is believed to be responsible for:

• 90% of anal and cervical cancers
• Approximately 70% of vaginal and vulvar cancers
• Around 60% of penile cancers

While not all oral cancers are caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV)—the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S.—there is a well-established link between the virus and certain types of head and neck cancers.

WATCH: Understanding the Human Papillomavirus

“The important thing to know about HPV is that there are many different strains, and only a couple of them tend to be more cancer-inducing, Dr. Allen Ho, a head and neck surgeon at Cedars-Sinai, explained to SurvivorNet.

Treatment for HPV-related oral cancers often involves surgery to remove the tumor, but may also include chemotherapy, radiation, or targeted drug therapies. In advanced cases, these treatments can affect a patient’s ability to eat or speak, although rehabilitation therapy can help many regain these essential functions.

Health experts strongly recommend the HPV vaccine, which protects against the strains most likely to cause cancer.

WATCH: ‘People Need to Know That HPV Can Cause These Cancers’: Survivor Pushes for HPV Vaccine Education

Gardasil 9, the most widely used HPV vaccine, offers broad protection.
According to the National Cancer Institute, it guards against “nine HPV types: the two low-risk HPV types that cause most genital warts, plus seven high-risk HPV types that cause most HPV-related cancer.”

One of the most dangerous strains is HPV 16, which is responsible for 92% of head and neck cancers. The vaccine triggers an immune response that prevents infection from this strain, making it a powerful tool in cancer prevention.

“The key with the vaccine is that you receive it before you have sexual encounters,” explains Dr. Jessica Geiger, a medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center. “So that’s why these vaccines are approved for young children ages 9, 10, 11 years old, up to age 26.”

What Does the Future Hold?

Many in the cancer community are still grappling with how best to use artificial intelligence (AI), although many experts tell SurvivorNet they see value in such technology. However, technological advances still don’t replace an experienced clinician who can analyze patient test results and monitor their response to treatment in real time.

A groundbreaking artificial intelligence program that has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), called Clairity Breast, may change the way doctors assess breast cancer risk from screening mammograms.

WATCH: Do I Need a 3D Mammogram?

While not a replacement for traditional mammography, this AI-powered tool can enhance current screening practices and improve early detection efforts, according to Dr. Mary Newell, a breast imaging specialist at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University.

“This new approach can enhance the current standard of care,” Dr. Newell tells SurvivorNet.

Clairity Breast analyzes subtle patterns in screening mammograms linked to future breast cancer risk, generating a validated five-year risk score. This score is seamlessly integrated into clinical systems, enabling more personalized follow-up care.

“We can identify patients who are at elevated risk and offer supplemental screening to them with breast MRI or other technologies as a way to increase the likelihood of early detection. It does not replace mammography, and in fact, relies on mammographic images to allow the risk assessment,” she adds.

Currently, women at average risk are advised to begin yearly mammograms at age 40. While Clairity Breast does not change these guidelines, Dr. Newell noted that it could help identify patients who may need earlier screening or additional imaging methods.

“It may allow us to identify patients who should start screening at an earlier age if they are shown to be at elevated risk,” she said. “It can also allow us to identify patients who may benefit from supplemental screening technologies, in addition to their yearly mammogram, after the age of 40.”

Unlike AI programs designed to detect cancer directly from images, Clairity Breast functions as a risk assessment tool. It does not interpret mammograms for cancer detection but instead works alongside traditional methods to pinpoint patients who may be at higher risk.

“Other AI tools are being developed that provide assistance with interpretation, helping to detect a cancer that may already be present,” Dr. Newell explained. “But most of the literature to date suggests that AI tools work best when deployed in conjunction with interpretation by a breast radiologist.”

Clairity Breast represents a promising step in breast cancer prevention, offering a new layer of analysis that helps doctors identify high-risk patients early and refine screening approaches — all while keeping mammography at the core of detection.

WATCH: Lung Cancer Can Lack Specific Symptoms, Making It Difficult to Detect

Similarly, a health system in Louisiana is using an AI tool that scans radiologists’ reports to flag subtle indicators of elevated lung cancer risk.

Lung cancer is notoriously difficult to detect early due to its subtle symptoms that can be easily mistaken for something else, such as fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, and weight loss.

Dr. Raja Flores, Chairman of the Department of Thoracic Surgery and the Steven and Ann Ames Professor in Thoracic Surgery for the Mount Sinai Health System, tells SurvivorNet he understands how subtle signs of lung cancer can be missed. He adds that the AI technology to help flag suspicious lung cancer nodules more easily is a huge step forward.

WATCH: Steps to Take After a Lung Cancer Diagnosis

“The use of AI at Our Lady of Lourdes to flag suspicious lung nodules across routine imaging is an important step toward earlier detection, when a cure is still possible,” Dr. Flores tells SurvivorNet.

“Paired with advanced robotic bronchoscopy, this approach may reduce unnecessary delays in diagnosis, lower the risk of complications during biopsy, and streamline the process of confirming whether a nodule is cancer,” Dr. Flores adds.

He emphasizes that AI does not replace expert clinical judgment, but when integrated into a multipronged approach to care, it can help close the gap between detection and a cure.

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