Beschreibung:
<jats:sec><jats:label /><jats:p>Differentiation therapy (DT) is directed to the self‐renewing cancer stem cells, as well as their progeny transit amplifying cells, to force them to mature to terminal differentiation. Differentiation therapy is effective in treatment of neuroblastomas and myeloid leukemias. Check point inhibition (CPI) therapy removes blocks to cancer reactive T‐killer cells and allows them to react to malignant cells and limit growth of cancer. The percent of patients with a given cancer that respond to either therapy is less than hoped for and the duration of response is variable. Multiplying the response rate (% of patients responding to therapy) by the duration of response may be used to derive a survival score for patients treated with DT or CPI. By this criterion DT gives better survival scores than CPI. Yet, CPI is considered a great success, mostly because it may be applied to many different types of cancer and DT is considered relatively ineffective because it is limited to a few specific cancers. On the other hand, the cost of CPI treatment is 10 to 20 times more per patient than DT. Hopefully, future combined treatments and advances in both approaches will increase the effectiveness and decrease the cost of these cancer treatments. For example, resent results with combination therapy of melanoma with two check point inhibitors has substantially increased the survival score.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Support or Funding Information</jats:title><jats:p>No support</jats:p></jats:sec>