New Drug Gives Bladder Cancer Patients Fresh Hope

The drug works the same way Keytruda worked to help stop former President Jimmy Carter's advanced melanoma

A newly approved drug is giving the boost needed to stall the spread of tumors in patients with advanced bladder cancer, NBC News reports. 

The drug, called atezolizumab, is sold under the name Tecentriq and works the same way Keytruda, which helped stopped former President Jimmy Carter’s advanced melanoma. The new drugs act directly on immune cells that are supposed to destroy tumors. 

The treatment stopped tumors from growing in 24 percent of patients in the study and shrank them by 30 percent, according to the team of researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center, who treated some of the patients. 

Earlier approaches included revving up the immune system, but those methods didn’t always work. Other approaches, such as amplifying a patient’s own tumor-specific cells were labor-intensive and didn’t work for everyone. 

Tecentriq has won Food and Drug Administration approval last month, but it comes at a high cost: $12,500 a month.

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