There are cases of adaptive resistance to immune-based therapies. These are less common, although they do arise. However, it is still the same kind of game - tumors use the same tricks to hide from an immune response ignited by an immunotherapy as they do from an immune response without immunotherapy.
Anyway, I hope things continue to remain reasonably in check for her. Cancer is a terrible thing.
The oncologist told us life expectancy is around 15 years which, while ~10x better than GBM, is a pretty disappointing thing to hear when you're in your early thirties. But that number comes from looking back at people diagnosed in recent decades, so we're really hoping that new treatments will change the equation going forward.
This is true.
Interestingly, they're now starting to use Game Theory to beat cancer [1].
[1] http://fortune.com/2018/08/10/beating-cancer-game-theory/
It seems many types of cancer can evolve resistance to treatment with a single type of immunotherapy. Similar to how HIV quickly evolved resistance to treatment by one ARV (antiretroviral).
But HIV can be kept in check by a cocktail of 3 ARVs simultaneously. And there's some recent research from Mass General where they managed to eradicate brain tumors in mice using 3 different immunotherapies simultaneously: https://advances.massgeneral.org/neuro/journal.aspx?id=1263
> Dr. Curry's group describes "a likely oversimplified, but reasonable" summary of the mechanism of the triple therapy: GVAX expands the number and diversity of activated tumor-specific T cells and increases the number of intratumor CD8+ T cells, while PD-1 inhibition further invigorates the effects of those mobilized cells. Meanwhile, agonist anti-OX40 continues to skew systemic and tumor microenvironments toward Th1 immunity, suppress regulatory T cells and prevent T cell exhaustion.
Hopefully this is a way forward for treating humans too!