Using two immunotherapies in colon cancer helps, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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People with a type of advanced colorectal cancer who were treated with two different immunotherapy drugs did much better than a group treated with a standard type of chemotherapy, a new study reports. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins explains.

Nelson: The trial's going to go on for longer and they're going to collect more data. Only the combined immunotherapy nivolumab ipilumimab versus chemotherapy arm and the immunotherapy arm outperformed the chemotherapy arm. At 24 months 72% of the folks that got the immunotherapy were free of any disease that one could see whereas only 14% of the chemotherapy folks hadn't gotten worse. They're going to report on all the other things later, the side effects were what they expected for chemotherapy and for those combined immunotherapy.         :32

Nelson says what still needs to be reported is how one type of immunotherapy works alone. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.