Lung cancer is the most deadly form of cancer. Every year the disease kills 1.6 million people. A new therapy hopes to reverse that trend.

Nivolumab is a suite of drugs developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and recently presented to the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The treatment works to alter the patient’s immune system. Cancerous cells are notorious for deflecting attempts of the body’s natural defense systems. Many tumors are capable of producing a protein called PD-L1 allowing them to switch off any white blood cells that try to attack. In this way, the tumor is able to avoid destruction and wreak havoc on the body.

Nivolumab stops cancers from affecting the immune system in this way, meaning the body’s natural defenses are able to continue attacking the tumor.

“Nivolumab is the first PD-1 inhibitor to show a significant improvement in overall survival in a phase III trial in non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer,” said Dr Luis Paz-Ares, a lead researcher on the study from the Hospital Universitario Doce de Octubre in Madrid, Spain.

In Europe and America, 582 patients in late stages of advanced lung cancer were treated with Nivolumab after already trying several other cancer treatments.

With the standard treatments, patients with this degree of cancer live for only nine months. After taking Nivolumab, patients lived for twelve months. Some patients who responded particularly well to the treatment survived for 19.4 months.

Dr. Paz- Ares remarked that these results “mark a milestone in the development of new treatment options for lung cancer.”

“It’s really exciting, I think these drugs will be a paradigm shift in how we treat lung cancer,” said Dr Martin Forster from the University College London Cancer Institute, one of several other companies researching this line of cancer therapy.

“Advances like these are giving real hope for lung cancer patients, who have until now had very few options,” said Dr Alan Worsley, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK.

Usually, if chemotherapy fails to eradicate the cancer, patients have dismal prospects of recovery. Now, there is at least some hope.

Nivolumab has been approved in the United States to treat certain diseases including melanoma. Regulators worry about the long term consequences of manipulating the immune system. For the foreseeable future, these new drugs will only have limited application, especially given the extremely high cost.