Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear
Over the past 20 years, a class of cancer drugs called CD40 agonist antibodies have shown great promise—and induced great disappointment. While effective at activating the immune system to kill cancer cells in animal models, the drugs had limited impact on patients in clinical trials and caused dangerously systemic inflammatory responses, low platelet counts, and liver toxicity, among other adverse reactions—even at a low dose. But in 2018, the lab of Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey V. Ravetch