Harnessing T Cells to Beat Lung Cancer

Until recently, there wasn’t much science could do for someone like Kaye Paterson. A social worker who lives outside Pittsburgh, Paterson first noticed a persistent cough in 2007. She was 27, had never smoked, and was otherwise in good health. “I never in a hundred thousand million years thought it was cancer,” she says. Her doctors didn’t either: It took them four years to make the correct diagnosis, and by then her lung cancer had spread. The prognosis was grim: Only 1 percent of those diagnosed in Stage IV live as long as five years.

In November, Paterson began treatment as part of a clinical trial for a new class of drugs called immunotherapies. Such drugs don’t target the cancer directly. Instead, they help the body’s immune system fight tumors, often by attacking the proteins that disguise the disease from T cells. The high expectations surrounding immunotherapies have sparked dealmaking in the pharmaceutical industry. A Dec. 29 report from Leerink Partners, a boutique investment bank that specializes in health care, estimates sales could reach $40 billion a year at their peak. Pfizer’s $117 billion bid for AstraZeneca was fueled in part by its desire to get its hands on MEDI4736, a lung cancer drug that’s undergoing Phase III trials. Rebuffed by Astra in May, Pfizer struck a deal with Merck KGaA worth as much as $2 billion for the rights to its immunotherapy drug, which is being tested on a rare skin cancer. So far only three immune treatments have been approved in the U.S., all for advanced melanoma.