“Glioblastoma is the most common type of malignant brain cancer. It can strike at any age, and it’s uniformly fatal. Patients are often diagnosed in the emergency room after the tumor causes some somatic catastrophe, such as seizure, sudden loss of speech, or an inability to control the limbs on one side of the body. The median time from diagnosis to death is just over a year.

The first step in treating the disease hasn’t changed in decades: ‘maximal safe resection,’ a surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible while preserving neurological function. Because glioblastoma is so adept at infiltrating the brain, the surgeon almost always leaves cancer behind, which quickly starts growing again. Some patients respond to radiation or the chemotherapy drug temozolomide, but even that adds months rather than years to the average survival time. Roger Stupp, an expert in glioblastoma, told me the disease had proved to be ‘a graveyard of ideas.’ Decades of research have gone nowhere.

Within the past 20 years, however, a once unfashionable field called immunotherapy has upended all expectations in oncology. It proceeds from a simple premise: The human immune system is very good at attacking anything it registers as disease. If it could be turned against cancer, it could eliminate a tumor more thoroughly than a surgeon’s knife and more durably than the poison of chemotherapy.”

From New York Magazine.