Context:
These gains are largely thanks to historic breakthroughs in the past few years with
a bevvy of methods to employ patients’ own immune systems, collectively known as immunotherapy. But still large obstacles remain when it comes to getting immunotherapy to work for many different types of tumors. Although some cancers—particularly those that are rife with mutations like lung cancer or melanoma—create more tangible targets on the surface of cells for the immune system to recognize and attack, other malignancies such as prostate and pancreatic cancers have proved more intransigent. As Scientific American reported earlier this year, more than half of the current cancer clinical trials do incorporate some form of immunotherapy but still oncologists are often only in the early stages of understanding how to use such treatment on a larger scale. Even with the cancers that are further along in their immunotherapy responses, a “certain fraction of those kinds of tumors, I don’t know we’ll ever cure,” Allison says.
MOre:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-we-truly-cure-cancer/#