Drug could double lung cancer patients’ life expectancy

A drug that frees the immune system to attack a devastating form of lung cancer has been shown to double the life expectancy of genetically targeted patients.

Nivolumab is one of new generation of immunotherapy drugs that release cancer-applied brakes on the immune system called “checkpoints”.

The results, from a major international trial involving patients who had already been treated for the most common form of lung cancer, were described by one expert as a “paradigm shift”.