Doctors hail ‘potential cure’ for a common cancer

By Gina Kolata – Financial Review

A group of 97 patients had long-standing multiple myeloma, a common blood cancer that doctors consider incurable, and faced a certain, and extremely painful, death within about a year.

They had gone through a series of treatments, each of which controlled their disease for a while. But then it came back, as it always does. They reached the stage where they had no more options and were facing hospice.

They all got immunotherapy, in a study that was a last-ditch effort.

A third responded so well that they got what seems to be an astonishing reprieve.

And after five years, it still has not returned in those patients – a result never before seen in this disease.