Just as a thought, this isn't the first anti-PD1 drug out there. There are several on the market already with fairly long track records of clinical experience. There are some which block the receptor and some which block the ligand. I'm not terribly familiar with them because I'm not a cancer specialist, but I'm not sure this is as "new" as is being suggested. Oh, and none of these are cheap. Big pharma makes big profit off of these ones.

Also this is a small trial, only 18 people. That's an incredibly small sample, so we'd really need to see this replicated in a sample 10x that size or better.

Also, we need to be very nuanced here about the "cure" itself. Cancer isn't a monolith. We talk about it like it's a communicable disease sometimes and that's wrong. Cancer is a cell with several key mutations in key functions such that the cell grows and divides/reproduces when it shouldn't. The specific mutations matter because those specific proteins are the drug targets, many times. When we find "cures," often it means we found something that's effective for one specific mutation. It turns off a signal which has been erroneously turned on. But again, cancer is not just one mutation. It's several of them and they're not consistent from tissue to tissue, organ to organ, person to person. Each case is unique, so the treatments are all customized.

This idea that pharma's hiding some miracle "cure" for all of the various cancers out there is a myth. They may have some promising leads, but all of that has to be proven in years' and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of testing.

My point: hopium's good, but let the specialists do their thing. Cancer's a lot more complicated that most people understand.