"When we see such success like this, it is really a marker of all of the work that has been put into this over decades. In my field, multiple myeloma, the last 15 years have been huge strides of progress in what therapies we have available for patients. This is just evidence of all the hard work that millions of people - scientists, physicians, nurses, the patients themselves - have all been putting in over decades and decades. The thing that matters the most is that it means that people are around to spend time with their families who otherwise wouldn't have had that chance," explained Dr. Haley Simpson, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at UNC School of Medicine.
Simpson credited a combination of advanced treatment options and improved screening protocols in helping drive up survival rates.
"We have screened more people than we had in the past, and we have screening guidelines. They've been adjusted to screen patients earlier and earlier," said Simpson.
Many of these advances are the result of decades of work and clinical trials. Since the mid-1990s, the American Cancer Society reports survival rates for myeloma have increased from 32% to 62%, for liver cancer from 7% to 22%, and for lung cancer from 15% to 28%.
"(Last) September, the five-year survival follow-up was published from one of our CAR T-cell therapies for (Multiple myeloma), and there are a subset of the patients who were treated, (who) were very sick people who'd been fighting the disease for years and years. A handful of those people are alive without evidence of the cancer at all, even looking at a detailed study in the bone marrow. At five years cancer-free with no treatment, at what point do we call these patients cured? And I think that's a philosophical discussion that we are currently having in the field. Are cancers that we didn't call curable for many, many years, are they now being considered a curable disease? I think that's where the future of cancer research is going," said Simpson.
The improved cancer survival rates are particularly notable in cancers long considered to be the most deadly.
"When I look over all the things that I've surpassed, I thank God for where I am. I thank God for medicine, I thank God for treatment options, I thank God for clinical trials. Because the people who have been on these trials paved the way for myself and others," added Thomas Goode, a multiple myeloma survivor.
Goode said he had not heard of the rare blood cancer when he was diagnosed more than two decades ago.
"When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2005, I was given three to five years as a newly diagnosed patient. Medications that's out now weren't available back then," said Goode.
He underwent chemotherapy, radiation, and stem-cell transplants as part of his protocol. Now, he receives monoclonal antibody treatments every two weeks and takes a daily pill at home.
"This is 21 years of me living with this disease. Now others look at me and say, 'Hey, that's hope. Now I could thrive off of what he's doing. I can look at what he's doing. And now I have confidence that this myeloma battle, (this) journey is not going to be as bad as I'm thinking it could be,'" Goode said.
He helped start the Triangle chapter of the International Myeloma Foundation, and even took a bike trip overseas to Iceland alongside his doctor and 12 others to raise awareness of myeloma.
"Some of the things that I've done over my life, I would have never probably wouldn't done it if I didn't have the myeloma diagnosis. A lot of the stuff that I'm looking at every day (I feel that), I'm glad that I'm here to see these things," said Goode.