This discovery may just revolutionize skin-cancer treatment

June 7, 2015 8:39 PM

Skin-cancer rates are climbing and they are climbing super fast.

Cancer treatment

Skin-cancer rates are climbing and they are climbing super fast.

The deadliest form of skin cancer, melanoma, is also the most common form of cancer in 25- to 29-year-olds.

The good news is that, there’s a medical breakthrough for melanoma, and it's a big deal.

A trial conducted by U.K. doctors of 945 patients discovered that a combination of two drugs, called ipilimumab and nivolumab, shrank tumors by at least a third in nearly 60 percent of the patients over the period of an average of 11.5 months.

The way these drugs work together is freakishly complicated.

The BBC describes the process as taking off the “brakes” that the immune system sometimes places on the body's response to tumors and cancerous tissues, in other words, the body doesn’t try to stop their growth.

Dr. James Larkin, a consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital, told the BBC that these drugs seem to allow the immune system to “recognize tumors it wasn’t previously recognizing and…destroy them.”

On helping people live longer, "We hope these early responses will turn out to be durable,” Larkin told the BBC. “But at the moment we can't say.”

This is great news, albeit unstable, so why don;t we continue working on prevention measures

Watch this video on tips for self tanning.

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