The article reports, "Most experts believe it will take combinations of immunotherapy drugs—or combinations of immunotherapy with other cancer treatments—to optimize their impact. But finding safe and effective combinations is a daunting undertaking." Yes. A lot of researchers, including researchers at companies that could commercialize applications of the latest research findings, are working on the general approach described in this interesting article, because the approach, if refined, promises substantial increase in healthy lifespan for many patients diagnosed with cancer. Making each patient's own immune system more responsive to cancerous cells looks like an important part of further advancing cancer treatment.

A key idea in medical treatment research is to look for an "endpoint" that actually matters for the patient. When the researchers looked for tumor shrinkage, they sometimes didn't find it soon enough to think that the patients were benefitting from treatment, but the patient Tom Telford named in the story reported feeling better during treatment, even when his tumor still appeared to be huge on scans of the tumor. When the researchers looked for the "hard endpoint" of patient survival, they found out these new treatments are better than they had realized at first. Proxy endpoints never beat hard endpoints in evaluating a treatment.

One more comment about how the story is presented. I will be really glad when doctors speaking to reporters, who are trying to talk in conversational, understandable language, and the reporters themselves get out of the habit of personifying or anthropomorphizing cancer cells, immune system cells, tumors, or even autonomous human body functions. Cancer cells and immune system cells are not knowing agents. They adapt (that is, successful cells survive while others die) but they don't "learn."