Jocelyn KaiserWhile even the best cancer drugs don’t buy much time for most people whose cancer has spread, there are rare exceptions: The patients whose multiple tumors melt away and who remain healthy years later.
Researchers have long dismissed these “exceptional responders” as unexplainable outliers. Now, an effort to systematically study them is yielding data that could help improve cancer treatments.
The project, led by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), examined the DNA of tumors and immune cells found around or within those cancers in 111 exceptional responders.
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