Nivolumab helps fight Cancerous Lung Tumors A trial has suggested that a therapy for lung cancer has the ability to double the life expectancy in patients. Nivolumab is able to stop cancerous cells hiding from body's defenses. The trial showed results from more than 550 patients which were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Lung cancer, which is also known as carcinoma of the lung, is the deadliest form of cancer that kills about 1.6 million people every year. It is difficult to treat the cancer as it is usually diagnosed late. In addition, a number of patients are found unsuitable for surgery due to their smoking-related diseases.

Nivolumab is among the set of drugs known as �checkpoint inhibitors� that are developed by a number of pharmaceutical companies. Those drugs stop cancers by turning off the immune system of human so that it could keep on attacking the harmful tumor.

The new trial was conducted in the United States and Europe on people with advanced lung cancer. Those people had already tried other treatments, but didn�t receive satisfactory results. As per the trial results, patients on standard therapy lived for about 9.4 months, but the patient who took Nivolumab lived for more than one year on average. However, some patients did spectacularly well. Those whose tumors were producing high levels of PD-L1 lived for more than one and half year.

The data about Nivolumab was presented by the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb. Luis Paz-Ares, doctor at the Hospital Universitario Doce de Octubre in Madrid and lead researcher of the trial, said, �The results mark a milestone in the development of new treatment options for lung cancer. Nivolumab is the first PD-1 inhibitor to show a significant improvement in overall survival in a phase III trial in non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer�.