BARCELONA, Spain — Ten years ago, a new type of cancer treatment reached the market. It worked by rousing the body’s own immune cells to attack tumors. Within months, regulators had approved two of the treatments, at first for melanoma.
The story — and the transformative impact — of Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo and Merck’s Keytruda are well known at this point. Yet the field has also been in a moment of commemoration, both because a decade on seems like a fitting time to celebrate all that has been achieved, and because researchers now have 10 years of data to demonstrate how the drugs are helping patients over the long term.
Those results have prompted a once-unthinkable debate about how and when to declare a patient with metastatic melanoma cured. And as the immunotherapies have won approval in other cancers over the years, they’ve also reset what doctors and patients alike think cancer care can do.
