A pioneering new drug treatment appears to have cured a British man with terminal skin cancer.
Warwick Steele, 64, had only been given months to live when doctors started treatment with pembrolizumab, which is injected directly into the bloodstream.
After three months, Steele’s tumours had almost completely disappeared, and after six months they do not appear to have regrown and were fund to have shrunk even further.
While doctors cannot be sure that Steele’s recovery was due to the new drug, early stage testing does seem to show that it offers a “paradigm shift” in cancer therapy, according to Steele’s consultant.
In trials, the drug was tested on 411 patients with melanoma and 70% of patients were still alive 12 months after beginning treatment, a notably higher percentage than those on alternative therapies, according to ITN.
Pembrolizumab is a synthetic antibody in development by Merck that targets the programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) receptor, which is activated by some cancers including melanoma, to suppress the immune system.
Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer and affects 13,300 people in the UK each year.
