New Drug For Cancer Treatment Poses Higher Risk In The Body

In Waterbury, Conn. emergency room on a Sunday, Mr. Chuck Peal lays in his bed. He appeared to be dying and the doctors were not sure why. It happened in early September.

According to The New York Times, Mr. Chuck Peal has gone in and out of consciousness, his blood pressure plummeted, soaring potassium levels and his blood sugar was 10 times higher than the normal level. A doctor is expecting a heart attack, and the uncertainty keeps going as he is urgently researching the situation on his phone.

Mr. Peal's action was not due to a heart attack but otherwise a reaction of the body attacking itself. It was a severe reaction of his immune system because of the side effect of his miraculous cancer treatment aimed to save his life.

Seven weeks prior the event, doctors at Yale fights Mr. Peal's melanoma by the two most promising drugs available for cancer treatment today. These drugs work by stimulating the immune system to specifically attack the cancers as aggressively as they attack other threats like viruses and bacteria.

They are called immunotherapy drugs, which was a big breakthrough in cancer treatment, thus attracting billions of research dollars and giving the patients the hope they need to fight the cancer. But as the use of these drugs grows the doctors found out that it poses serious risks. The unleashed immune system can attack the healthy vital organs like the bowel, the liver, lungs, kidneys, adrenal and pituitary glands, the pancreas and in some rare cases includes the heart.

The doctors at Yale also believe that the immunotherapy is causing a new type of acute-onset diabetes. Having at least 17 new cases of this so far, Mr. Peal is included to these 17 cases. In other cancer clinics around the world, the side effects are showing up more clearly.