By the time Sara Sade learned that she had metastatic melanoma, hundreds of tumors had developed in her body, “from my feet to my head,” she recalls. “The disease had spread like wildfire.”
At that stage, Sara’s life expectancy was a year or less. But her doctor at Roswell Park treated her with a type of immunotherapy called a checkpoint blockade or checkpoint inhibitor. After four infusions, the tumors disappeared — and today, six years later, Sara remains cancer-free.
“Checkpoint inhibitors are the main type of immunotherapy used today,” explains Carl Morrison, MD, DVM, President and Founder of the Roswell Park precision-medicine spinoff company OmniSeq®. “They stand to replace virtually all chemotherapy in the next five to 10 years. In fact, they have already replaced half of chemotherapy in half of lung cancer cases, and they’ve become virtually the line of choice for metastatic melanoma.
“One reason checkpoint inhibitor therapy has radically changed the world of therapies is that for the first time, people are willing to say the word cure. Somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of these patients actually establish a cure, or at least long-lasting durable responses.”