Out of 12, only 6 saw their tumor shrink and 2 were tumor free.

Thats 17% saw a complete response, 33% a partial response and 50% no response.

It’s not particularly striking results, though any progress is welcome.

University press releases aren’t exactly the most unbiased sources of scientific information.

A 50% occurence of systemic improvements across various cancer types is pretty great.

If it has only minor side effects when treating agressive cancers, it could be a huge quality of life improvement for patients compared to other treatment options.

Worth noting that all 12 were already metastatic cancer patients, so they probably already had a rather low 5-year survival chance. I'm under the impression that seeing even a partial tumor response is pretty striking.

As others pointed out, these are stage I trials and these are patients that have had other treatments already. In particular the melanoma patients had already had other immunotherapy - which is known to work for 50+% of cases - so this could help plugging the gap for the rest.

I get the impression that the study involved about patients that normally have no chance of recovery.

But it's worth noting the relatively low effectiveness means that someone who has the option of using an "ordinary" treatment with a known, higher effectiveness should do so.

Please note that these were metastatic patients after unsuccessful earlier treatments, not a random group of freshly diagnosed patients whose tumors would be less aggressive on average.

I don't see any reason to be dismissive of this result. It is, indeed, striking to have half of terminal patients respond to a new treatment and two completely healed.

It is also striking that this treatment works on multiple cancer types.

Overall - striking, yes. N == 1, but I am awestruck. Let us hope that the larger trials won't disappoint us.

That's not the way to look at the numbers. First, you'd want to talk about whether the results are statistically significant. Second, when dealing with a fatal disease, people are pretty happy if their odds of survival go up by a few %.

Melanoma grows from incredibly fast. Like you can watch it grow fast.

That type of response is pretty incredible. The details of each patient isn’t known, and obviously there is a lot of work to do. But this is an amazing result and a future drug will save lives.

> University press releases aren’t exactly the most unbiased sources of scientific information.

Can you blame them? They're always looking for funding for their research, and the current climate is not the best.

Any treatment with a low likelihood of disqualifying other treatments is worth having in the toolbox. So the question is not percent efficacy but percent side effects.

Given this is a phase one trial, and the prognosis of the patients in question, those are still pretty striking results.