Four young women had an extremely rare, aggressive and fatal form of ovarian cancer. They where not expected to live much longer as there was no standard treatment. These women, living in different countries, asked their doctors to try using new immunotherapy drugs for the treatment of the cancer. They were told the drugs were not a treatment for the ovarian cancer. The women where able to get the immunotherapy treatment and their cancers went into remission. It looks as if the doctors were wrong in these cases for immunotherapy being a successful treatment.

The women managed to successfully have the immunotherapy treatment, and have now returned to work and their lives returned to a state of normalcy after having this aggressive form of cancer. Scientists are struggling to understand why the drugs worked when they should have not been effective to treat the ovarian cancer. If researchers can figure out why it worked in these cases, it may open the door to new treatments for other cancers that have not been thought not to respond to immunotherapy treatments.

Read the entire New York Times Article.