Here are the first three quotes–in total–from a story that appeared this week:
"Amazing."
"A game-changer."
"A watershed moment."
What could they possibly refer to? Grand Theft Auto V? Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball video? Ted Cruz's secret meeting at Tortilla Coast?
None of the above. They come at the start of three consecutive paragraphs in an Oct. 14 story by Gina Kolata at The New York Times, and they refer to "a new era in cancer treatment." If that isn't exciting enough, she writes that it is "an inflection point…a moment in medical history when everything changed."
The sources Kolata contacted to ask about the new era were apparently so breathless with excitement that all they could manage was one- or two-word answers. The reference to a new era comes in the sixth graf and is immediately followed by this:
“Amazing,” said Dr. Drew Pardoll, the immunotherapy research director at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This period will be viewed as an inflection point, he said, a moment in medical history when everything changed.
“A game-changer,” said Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
“A watershed moment,” said his colleague, Dr. Michel Sadelain. (Both say they have no financial interests in the new drugs; Dr. Pardoll says he holds patents involving some immunotherapy drugs, but not the ones mentioned in this article.)
Incredibly, Kolata retracts all of this in the very next graf: "Researchers and companies say they are only beginning to explore the new immunotherapies and develop others…"
Only beginning? How can it be a new era and an inflection point when research is only beginning? What if the therapies don't work?
Kolata's story is about ways to induce the immune system to attack cancer cells. "Researchers discovered that cancers wrap themselves in an invisible protective shield. And they learned that they could break into that shield with the right drugs," she writes. Drugs that can do that have been "found to help" patients with melanoma, kidney, and lung cancer, and "in preliminary studies, they also appear to be effective in breast cancer, ovarian cancer" and a few others. Drugs that are "found to help" or have been tested only in "preliminary studies" do not demarcate a new era in cancer treatment.
Kolata also says that there is another immune-system strategy–to take white blood cells out of the body and engineer them to attack a cancer. "Studies have just begun and are promising," she writes. But that is incorrect. This strategy was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1985, when Daniel Q. Haney of The Associated Press wrote about research in which "cells are treated outside the body and then injected into the patient, where they attack cancerous tumors throughout the body."
In 2010, Kolata reports, an immune-system drug helped patients with melanoma survive "an average of 10 months, or 4 months longer" than those who received a different treatment. "It was spectacular," says one of Kolata's sources. Really? A drug that buys patients four months is "spectacular"?
In another study, Kolata reports, one patient with lung cancer had a partial regression of her tumor. "It was not enough to call it a response," the researcher told Kolata, "but it was a signal." Does that sound like a new era in cancer treatment?
The story appeared in Tuesday's Science Times. That raises an interesting question. If the editors at the Times believed this story represented a new era in treatment and a historic inflection point, why didn't they put it on the front page? If they didn't believe that, why did they publish it at all?
-Paul Raeburn
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