Gilead Sciences on Monday said it plans to buy cancer-drug maker Forty Seven in a $US4.9 billion deal. The news sent Forty Seven’s stock up as much as 62% during regular trading. The deal is the latest to add to Gilead’s presence in cancer immunotherapy, an approach to treating cancer […]

Cancer immunotherapy researchers Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in cancer immunotherapy. Allison and Honjo’s work has led to the development and approval of medications that harness the body’s immune system to go after cancer. “I was really just […]

The FDA just approved a new treatment for an advanced form of skin cancer. The drug, Libtayo, is a checkpoint inhibitor, a kind of drug that’s part of a new class of cancer medications known as immunotherapy. It’s made by Regeneron and Sanofi. It’s the first treatment ever approved for […]

Biotech startup Alector is getting ready to put its first batch of neurodegenerative drugs into humans after raising an additional $US133 million. Alector is developing treatments that harness the body’s immune system to tackle conditions like Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia. The plan is to get two drugs into […]

A cutting-edge new cancer treatment from Novartis called Kymriah just got approved to treat more people with certain blood cancers last week, the drug’s second approval. The new approval – this time to treat large B-cell lymphoma – came with a new price tag: $US373,000 for the one-time treatment. It’s […]

The FDA just approved a cutting-edge therapy to treat more patients with certain forms of blood cancer. It’s the second approval for the drug, Kymriah, which is now approved to treat certain forms of leukemia and lymphoma. The therapy works by taking a person’s own cells, reprogramming them, and inserting […]

New cancer treatments that harness the body’s immune system are ready to go mainstream. In data presented Monday at the American Association of Cancer Research’s annual meeting, cancer-drug makers found that immunotherapy in combination with other drugs did a better job of treating lung cancer than chemotherapy alone. A combination […]

Two cancer drugmaker rivals presented data on Monday about how combinations of their drugs, which harness the body’s immune system to treat cancer, worked in treating a common form of lung cancer compared to traditional chemotherapy. Merck showed that its drug Keytruda in combination with chemotherapy cut the risk of […]

On Monday, three big players in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy are sharing data that could change how we treat lung cancer. The three companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, and Roche, are looking at how their immunotherapies, known as checkpoint inhibitors, can be used in combination – either with other […]

Cancer drugmaker Incyte said Friday that a key trial combining its cancer immunotherapy drug with a blockbuster drug from Merck failed in a late-stage trial. Incyte’s stock was down as much as 22% before markets opened on Friday morning, while Merck’s was down a little more than 1%. Cancer immunotherapy […]

Two executives who helped get one of the first cancer drugs that’s part of “a big new field of medicine” approved are back just a few months later with a new startup called Allogene. This time, they have got $US300 million to see if they can pull it off in […]

A promising new field of cancer treatment called cancer immunotherapy has been exploding – and with it, hundreds of trials that aim to get to a better understanding of which combinations of treatments work and which don’t. Dr. Norman Sharpless, the director of the National Cancer Institute, said that the […]

Researchers are working on new medications to treat allergies by targeting the body’s immune system. Biotech company Aimmune found that after a year on its a peanut allergy treatment, 67% of the kids with high peanut allergies were able to tolerate 600 milligrams of peanut protein (about two to four […]

Bristol-Myers Squibb on Monday said that its cancer immunotherapy treatments succeeded in a late-stage trial in a particular group of non-small cell lung cancer patients. In patients that had a certain amount of tumour mutations, the treatment – a combination of Opdivo and Yervoy – was superior at keeping cancer […]

The US Food and Drug Administration just...

Gilead is spending $12 billion to buy Kite...

Bristol-Myers Squibb, a company known for its...