What is immunotherapy, the treatment followed by Bernard Tapie?

Saved by a new treatment? It is the wish of more than one person with cancer and which seems to come true for Bernard Tapie. This Monday, DH, a Belgian media, published an interview with the former businessman who has suffered from double cancer of the esophagus and stomach for 3 years. Full of gratitude, he delivers a message of love to Belgium and claims to be happy to follow this new immunotherapy treatment since January in Louvain (Belgium) despite its side effects. “In France, to have peace, the doctors refuse to subject you to this treatment. But if we hadn’t started it, I certainly wouldn’t be here to tell you about it.says the businessman. Yes, I would have died without it.”

Immunotherapy is a family of treatments against cancer, like radiotherapy or chemotherapy, but which does not attack the tumor directly. She “mobilizes” “the patient’s immune defenses against their disease“explains the Cancer Foundation. This technique, developed since the 1970s, is based on the analysis of the camouflage of cancer cells in order to help the immune system to fight it. There are many strategies and multiple research programs.

Glimmer of hope

According to Inserm (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) this family of treatments would only be effective in 20 to 40% of patients. This experimental aspect did not frighten Bernard Tapie. “There are three stages for launching a new treatment on the market. My treatment is in the second stage. It will be necessary to wait for sufficient results for it to pass to the third stage. I am a kind of guinea pig for medicine” he summarizes. But he does not hide being subjected to “terrible side effects” and live”very complicated times” while ensuring that it “clench your teeth” and certify that “the tumor took a nasty blow”.

Behind this fierce will to live hides the hope inspired by the work and treatments of Dr Éric Van Cutsem and his teams. This professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (KU Leuven), head of the digestive oncology department at the University Hospital of Louvain (UZ Leuven) and co-president of the Cancer Foundation received in October 2019 a prize of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) for its role “pioneer in gastrointestinal oncology and his involvement in the promotion of medical oncology within gastrointestinal oncology departments.„ In the magazine Together against cancer last March, he thanked the donors of the Cancer Foundation. “Over the past 30 years, we [Fondation contre le cancer, NDLR] have invested 182 million euros in research, enabling Belgian teams to study certain key mechanisms and thus contribute to scientific progresssaid Dr. Van Cutsem. Work on immunotherapy now allows us to use the natural defense system of human beings to fight cancer. Using predictive markers, we are able to determine which therapy has the best chance of success for a certain tumor type, so that we can offer more effective treatment to patients.”