Studies: Experimental drugs that use immune system to fight cancer shrank tumors.

Research on experimental drugs that use the body's immune system to fight different types of cancer received extensive coverage in print and online, as well as on two national news broadcasts. Most of the sources, and the experts quoted by those sources, portrayed the findings as a potentially significant advance in cancer research.

        NBC Nightly News (6/2, story 6, 2:20, Holt) reported, "We're back with now big health news out of this weekend's meeting of more than 40,000 cancer doctors gathering to discuss new breakthroughs. Tonight, there's a promising new study getting a lot of attention." Physicians "hope it could lead to a new avenue of attack against some of the deadliest forms of cancer."

        On ABC World News (6/2, story 6, 1:40, Muir) ABC's John Schriffen reported that "the drug has shown promise in treating patients with" certain cancers.

        In a front-page story, the Wall Street Journal (6/2, A1, Winslow, Subscription Publication) reported that, according to research to be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, two experimental medications that help the body's immune system to identify and attack cancer cells shrank cancerous tumors.

        USA Today (6/2, Szabo) reported that in one "study of 296 patients with advanced tumors, a drug called an anti-PD-1 antibody shrank tumors by at least 30% in 18% of lung cancer patients; 28% of melanoma patients; and 27% of kidney cancer patients." In another "study of 207 patients with advanced disease, a drug called an anti-PD-L1 antibody shrank tumors in 10% of lung cancers; 17% of melanomas; 12% of kidney cancers; and 6% of ovarian cancers." In addition to being presented at the ASCO conference, the studies are published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. The "drugs also controlled cancer better than most drugs at this early stage of testing, when failure is the norm, says James Gulley, an immune therapy researcher at the National Cancer Institute."

        The New York Times (6/2, B3, Pollack, Subscription Publication) reported, however that the anti-PD-1 antibody, called BMS-936558, "did not appear to work for a small number of patients with prostate or colon cancer. And larger studies will be needed to determine whether freeing the immune system leads to side effects, like attacks on parts of the body besides the tumor."

        Bloomberg News (6/2, Langreth) reported, "The findings show that medicines that spur immune cells to attack cancer can work in more patients and tumor types than previously thought, said Antoni Ribas, an oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the" research. Ribas wrote, in "an editorial on the drug in the New England Journal of Medicine," that "we are getting response levels that go beyond what we were seeing before -- and in different types of cancer."

        On its website, ABC News (6/2) reported that "cancer specialists said the fact that the drug caused tumors to shrink, rather than simply to stop growing, is an important measure of success." ABC News added, "To see that kind of success against several different kinds of cancer, particularly against melanoma, kidney and lung cancers, which are notoriously unresponsive to many of the usual treatments doctors use to thwart them, was also unusual."

        The Hartford (CT) Courant (6/2, Weir) reported that co-author Scott Gettinger "said the progress made in the lung cancer tumors was most surprising." According to Gettinger, "Immunotherapy has been tried for a long time in lung cancer in prior studies and it never amounted to much." Also covering the story were The Oregonian (6/3, Rojas-Burke), CNN (6/3, Falco), Medscape (6/3, Mulcahy), and HealthDay (6/3, Gardner).