Healthcare Magazine April 2015 | Page 21

MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS OR SCIENCE FICTION ?
IORT focuses the radiation on the tumor during surgery as a single-dose . breathe easier in 2015 with the recent FDA-approval of two new experimental drugs . Pirfenidone and nintedanib slow the disease progress of the lethal lung disease , which causes scarring of the air sacs . Prior to these developments , there was no known treatment for IPF , where life expectancy after diagnosis is just 3 to 5 years .
Checkpoint Inhibitors Cancer kills approximately 8 million people annually and is difficult to treat , let alone cure . Immune checkpoint inhibitors have allowed physicians to make significantly more progress against advanced cancer than they ’ ve achieved in decades . Combined with traditional chemotherapy and radiation treatment , the novel drugs boost the immune system and offer significant , long-term cancer remissions for patients with metastatic melanoma , and there is increasing evidence that they can work on other types of malignancies .
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