[hanspragt]

Someone close passed away from lung cancer last year. He received immune therapy (keytruda), and while it may work wonders for others, it comes with drawbacks; My main issue was that it takes 4 to 5 treatments (with weeks between each treatment) before you even really know if it worked or not. This is valuable time that could be used to treat the cancer with chemo (which admittedly has way worse side effects than keytruda, but still).

[wellboy]

Are there numbers that say what the success rate of immuni therapy is?

[hanspragt]

It sort of depends on what you define as success. The goal was never to "cure" the cancer, rather, to shrink the tumor.

I hesitate to assign an exact percentage to the effectiveness since there are so many factors to consider, but I remember Keytruda being reported to shrink tumors in less than a third of patients who took it.

[iooi]

The goal is to cure, from the article, quoting the head of lung at Yale:

> “Chemotherapy has limitations. Immunotherapy has the ability to cure. I lead the Yale lung team. We have patients on these immunotherapies alive more than eight years.”

[hanspragt]

I am sorry, that wasn't clear; That was the goal in the specific case of my family-member. The tumors would never fully disappear, and he would likely need more treatments later on.