According to a report published by the American Association for Cancer Research on Wednesday, September 21, significant strides in treatments, diagnostic tools, and prevention strategies continue to drive down cancer death rates in the United States.
The group's annual Cancer Progress Report found that death rates from cancer have been dropping over the past two decades, particularly sharply in recent years. Because of that, there are more than 18 million cancer survivors in the country, up significantly from 3 million back in 1971.
Dr. Stephen Ansell, the senior deputy director for the Midwest at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Rochester, Minnesota, said that this is a really exciting time in cancer management. Ansell, who was not involved with the report, added that they see the downtrend of cancer deaths to continue.
Biden relaunches Cancer Moonshot initiative
President Joe Biden relaunched his "Cancer Moonshot" initiative this year, which expands funding for cancer research, especially immunotherapies. He outlined new steps last week to expand the program.
Dr. Lisa Coussens, the president of the American Association for Cancer Research, said that you can't stop funding basic science now because the current treatments will be good enough. She added that investing in basic science has a huge payoff to the public.
She highlighted the growing use of immunotherapies as an example of how cancer treatments have improved over the years. She said that their ability to utilize or leverage the power of the immune system to fight cancer is enormous, and it is why you are seeing much more significant survival rates in many cancers, such as kidney and lung cancers and melanoma.
Immunotherapies, an important weapon in the fight against cancer
Immunotherapies use a patient's immune system to fight off cancer. Dr. Larry Norton, the medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told NBC News that cancer cells are mavericks, but they are your own cells.
He explained that one's immune system is designed not to attack their own cells, but new drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors allow one's immune system to attack its own cancer cells.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first immune checkpoint inhibitor in 2011. The said drug, called ipilimumab, is used for metastatic melanoma. The agency has approved eight other immune checkpoint inhibitors for 18 types of cancer since then, according to the report.
The FDA approved the first new immune checkpoint inhibitor in eight years last March with the drug called relatlimab, which is used for melanoma.
The agency has also approved seven other cancer therapeutics in the previous year, including the first drug to treat uveal melanoma, the most common form of eye cancer in adults. The FDA also expanded the use of 10 existing drugs to other cancers.
