>Targeted chemotherapy consists of drugs that are meant to specifically kill cancer cells and not healthy cells.
Putting immunotherapies (like nivolumab) under this category I think will only confuse the reader about the state (and direction) of oncology.
Nivolumab doesn't target cancer cells, it blocks an inhibitory receptor on T-cells, which then kill cancer cells more readily. It's been approved for a wide range of cancer types since it's really a treatment of the immune system:
Approvals to date: melanoma, lung cancer, kidney cancer, hodgkin lymphoma, head and neck cancer, bladder cancer, MSI-H colorectal cancer.
The distinction between targeted therapies and immunotherapies is very important since, aside from different mechanism, they also tend to have very different trajectories of relapse/resistance. Any metastatic cancer is essentially guaranteed to become resistant to a targeted therapy within 6-18 months. Drugs like nivolumab, on the other hand, offer a minority of patients (10-40% depending on the cancer) a chance at durable responses (cancers either cured or prevented from spreading by immune surveillance).
I am being treated with pembrolizumab for metastatic MSI-H CRC (I'm in my late 20s). Last year the cancer rapidly metastasized further, covering my abdomen in tumors. Prognosis was not good to say the least.
It took around 12 weeks for the treatment to "kick in", but at that point tumor regression became rapid. Every CT scan since has shown significant reduction in the abdominal tumors until my last one a few weeks ago; there is no longer any sign of cancer in my abdomen. Overall, it went from "countless" visible tumors ranging from a few mm to several cms each in size, to nothing visible on CT today. o_O
Who knows what the future will bring. I'm trying to be optimistic but I'm also realistic about the statistics here. However, going from my literal death bed where I was in horrible pain suffering for 24 hours a day to quasi-normalcy in a matter of several months blows my mind when I think about it. It did give me horrible colitis (yay for autoimmune side-effects!), but I'll take that over a painful death any day of the week. The colitis is bad enough that they had to discontinue the treatment for a while.
tldr; Science rules. Side effects suck. And a sincere thank you to anyone reading who is or was ever involved in cancer research.
Putting immunotherapies (like nivolumab) under this category I think will only confuse the reader about the state (and direction) of oncology.
Nivolumab doesn't target cancer cells, it blocks an inhibitory receptor on T-cells, which then kill cancer cells more readily. It's been approved for a wide range of cancer types since it's really a treatment of the immune system:
https://www.drugs.com/history/opdivo.html
Approvals to date: melanoma, lung cancer, kidney cancer, hodgkin lymphoma, head and neck cancer, bladder cancer, MSI-H colorectal cancer.
The distinction between targeted therapies and immunotherapies is very important since, aside from different mechanism, they also tend to have very different trajectories of relapse/resistance. Any metastatic cancer is essentially guaranteed to become resistant to a targeted therapy within 6-18 months. Drugs like nivolumab, on the other hand, offer a minority of patients (10-40% depending on the cancer) a chance at durable responses (cancers either cured or prevented from spreading by immune surveillance).