An increasing number of people in the SurvivorNet community are now thinking about immunotherapy as an option. Making immunotherapy drugs accessible to more people, and figuring how to make them work better, is a huge endeavor and a major focus of the world’s researchers, as well as the big pharma companies that help fund them. We recently had a chance to sit down with a leader at one of the companies that’s really driving immunotherapy, Adam Lenkowsky, the head of U.S. Commercial at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
BMS, as the company is known, recently consummated a huge merger that it hopes will have an enormous impact on the future of cancer treatment: the $74 billon acquisition of Celgene.
Read More“I saw firsthand the effects that chemotherapy had on him,” Lenkowsky said. “And so that’s somebody that I fight for every single day at work.”
Combining Immunotherapies
Going forward, Lenkowsky explained, much of BMS’ focus will also be directed at combinations of immunotherapy drugs. When paired together, immunotherapy drugs, which empower the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, can have tremendous lifesaving potential.
In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, Bristol-Myers Squibb chairman and CEO Dr. Giovanni Carforio also said that the future of cancer therapy may lie in combination treatments.
Bristol-Myers Squibb chairman and CEO Dr. Giovanni Carforio spoke to SurvivorNet about how the field of cancer treatment is being transformed.
Lenkowsky shared that one of the most important and encouraging recent developments for BMS, and for the future of cancer, is the ability to use immunotherapy as the first course of treatment after someone is diagnosed with advanced cancer.
The main immunotherapy drug from BMS is called Opdivo, which falls into a class of immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors. They work by blocking a part of the immune system that prevents it from attacking cancer cells. In blocking that signal, the drugs give the immune system a green light to go in and fight off cancer.
Dr. Jim Allison, whose discovery of checkpoint inhibitors won him the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, told SurvivorNet that, with the emergence and growth of these new checkpoint inhibitors, “For the first time, we're getting truly curative therapies in many kinds of diseases. And not just in melanoma but in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer. It goes on and on.”
Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jim Allison spoke with SurvivorNet about what’s next for immunotherapy to save lives.
Tailoring Treatments to Match Specific Cancers
One of the areas that will be top-of-mind for the company is figuring out how to tailor treatments to specific cancer types in an approach that a lot of players in the field. New drugs are matched to specific subtypes of cancers with very specific characteristics such as genetic mutations. The remarkable progress in precision medicine goes hand-in-hand with a major shift in the way that companies and researchers approach cancer — that is, as countless different diseases rather than one overarching illness.
The hope, said Lenkowsky, is to “turn cancer from what is an acute illness into a chronic illness.”
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