In June 2004 I was asked to examine a 22-year-old woman who had just graduated from college and was
engaged to be married. During the months leading up to her graduation, Shirley (not her real name) had been
plagued by a nagging cough. Eventually a computed tomographic (CT) scan revealed multiple masses in and
around her lungs. A biopsy indicated metastatic melanoma that had spread from a skin cancer Shirley did not
know she had. She immediately began chemotherapy treatments timed around a hastily rescheduled wedding.
Unfortunately, two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments to her brain over the next two years
slowed but could not stop the tumors’ spread. Shirley was running out of options. I told her about a new study in
which an innovative medicine designed to supercharge a patient’s own immune system against cancer was being
tested.
It was a randomized trial, meaning not every participant would get the new medicine, at the time known as
MDX-010, but Shirley agreed to participate. After four treatments, a new set of CT scans showed that every trace
of melanoma had disappeared. To this day, Shirley remains in complete remission; she has two beautiful, healthy
children and, in her own words, has “gotten her life back.”
For me, as a cancer specialist and a researcher, seeing Shirley’s transformation validated many years of hope
that scientists could develop powerful cancer therapies that would work by setting the body’s own immune
system against malignancies. Optimism grew throughout the medical community last year as we learned about
similar successes with this and other immunotherapy treatments in patients with advanced leukemia and kidney
and lung cancers. Although immunotherapy is by no means a panacea, the recent advances may allow us to make
significantly more progress against the later stages of cancer than we have been able to achieve in recent decades.