It's the diagnosis no one wants to hear, but each year another 14 million people worldwide will be told they have cancer.
In the fight against this disease, our greatest weapon may lie within,
in the system already designed to fight for our bodies and our health.
Maureen was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in January, 2009. It had spread to her adrenal glands and liver.
It was inoperable, so she needed other options.
Maureen started chemotherapy treatments. The first round didn't work, and neither did the second or the third.
Maureen's options were running out. Her disease wasn't responding to the chemo.
Maureen had metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the lung with disease in her liver, in her adrenal. She had a heart metastasis.
She had just diffuse disease, and at that point her prognosis was on the order of a few months.
We decided it really wasn't working and I asked him if he had anything else.
And I must have been at [in] the right place at the right time, because he had said he had two trials coming up, and one of them was immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy uses parts of the body's own immune system to fight the cancer.
There are a few different types of immunotherapy, including vaccines and boosters for the immune system.
The trial at Yale uses lab-made antibodies, which target specific molecules.
Here's how it works.
The T-cells of the immune system help fight for our bodies, eliminating germs and preventing disease,
but cancer cells, which start as normal cells in the body before mutating, evade the immune system.
Specific molecules form a barrier around the cancer cells, sending out a signal that convinces the T-cells there's nothing abnormal.
By blocking these molecules, the cancer is then exposed, and the T-cells can do their job.
In a lab at Yale Cancer Center, Dr. Lieping Chen meets with his researchers.
In the battle against cancer, this is the front line.
He's the man who discovered PD-L1. That's one of the protein molecules that help shield cancer from the immune system.
For well over a decade, he worked on developing anti-PD-L1 to combat the protein.
This effect [is] tentatively long-lasting, meaning if it [the] patient responds, they responds [respond for] years.
[The] immune system still continue[s] [to] attack the cancer.
This is one of Maureen's scans from June 2010, before starting the immunotherapy.
You can see the large mass in her lung. And this is from just a few months later.
The mass, which had not responded to chemotherapy, significantly shrunk, almost gone.
And critically, there were no signs of new growth in other areas of the body.
And now it's two years after she finished her two years of therapy.
So, it's four years since she started Nivolumab, and at that point she had a prognosis again of a few months,
and we recently did a PET scan just to see, and we saw nothing.
There was no activity at all.
Immunotherapy doesn't work for every patient or every cancer.
That's what Dr. Chen and others are working on now --
to find out why, for instance, not everyone expresses the PD-L1 protein, and what other proteins might exist.
Combining immunotherapy with traditional treatments like chemo and radiation appear to be the way of the future.