Newer therapies are seeing benefits when it comes to cancer survival, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Research and development have very much improved treatments for many cancers, and that’s reflected in the nation’s latest report on cancer. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson says these improvements are especially seen in lung cancer and the skin cancer melanoma.

Nelson: That’s what you really see with lung cancer and melanoma particularly. Both of them have had a whole suite of so-called targeted therapies. These are drugs that directly go after specific defects in these cancers and that are different between one person and another, which is why we do gene testing. These are being deployed and they’re starting to show some benefit. And the others of course are the immunotherapies. Probably somewhere on the order of 15-20% of everyone with cancers all across the board show some kind of benefit, but they’re disproportionate benefits for lung cancer and for melanoma.  :34

Nelson hopes such therapies will impact more forms of cancer soon. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.