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“A lot of conventional cancer therapies are about destroying cells and can be quite damaging, but this is much more targeted and much more specific because it´s enabling our immune cells to come in and actually kill the tumour cells directly,” she told AFP. |
The therapy has only been used on patients for a few years, and is less effective for certain cancers such as pancreatic and brain cancer. |
But 800 clinical trials were in progress worldwide and more than 30 drugs under development as of June, according to the American Cancer Society. |
And the pharmaceutical industry has heavily invested in research in the field. |
The US Food and Drug Administration has already approved a number of immunotherapy treatments, including some targeting PD-1. |
“The booming field of immunotherapy that these discoveries have precipitated is still relatively in its infancy, so it´s exciting to consider how this research will progress in the future,” said Charles Swanton, Cancer Research UK´s chief clinician. |
Golstein, whose team first identified the CTLA-4 molecule in 1987, said the results have been very promising. |
“Immunotherapy is now possibly the most important recent discovery for cancer therapy in general, as an alternative to chemo,” he said. |
But it´s also not totally harmless, he added. |
“Activated immune cells can cause certain auto-immune complications in certain organs, but we can control those,” he said. |
A study released in June tested a form of immunotherapy against chemo for non-small-cell lung cancer, the most common lung cancer worldwide. |
It found that the drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) — which famously helped former US president Jimmy Carter stave off advanced melanoma that had spread to his brain — helped lung cancer patients live four to eight months longer than chemo. |
However, Karl Peggs of the University College of London said the therapy is not for everyone. |
“We know that some patients have a very low chance of responding… those with little evidence that these pathways are actively restricting the immune system, or those with cancers that are less heavily mutated,” he said. |
While in theory it should work for most forms of cancer, it´s most effective on those with the highest numbers of mutations such as melanomas, lung cancer and smoking, he added. |
And it has sometimes been met with too much enthusiasm by patients. In the US, some have reportedly asked their doctors to immediately use immunotherapy instead of traditional treatments like chemotherapy, even when they are more effective. |
After his big win on Monday, Allison warned that immunotherapy will not replace all other cancer treatments. |
Instead, it is “going to be part of therapy that potentially all cancer patients will receive in five years,” he told a press conference in New York. |
Honjo, meanwhile, said he wanted to continue his research “so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever”. |
Detective Inspector Lew Warner of the Bay of Plenty speaks to The New Zealand Herald about the murder of David Kuka who was killed in 2018 in Tauranga. |
Police investigating 'execution' shooting of David Kuka have released new image of car of interest to inquiry. Detectives believe he was victim of mistaken identity and are probing a link to another fatal shooting. |
People might not know David Kuka's name, but they'd recognise his face. |
Tall and rangy, with long dark hair, the 52-year-old was a well-known figure in downtown Tauranga where he'd walk down the street with his first raised to the sky, pointing to heaven. |
Wearing a leather vest with a cross on the back, Kuka would spend his weekend nights busking with his guitar and singing about his saviour. |
"Dad was a very loud and proud Christian," says his daughter Te Kimioranga Te Kuka. |
"He really cared about other people. People would remember him, if they stop to think. We miss him heaps." |
Twelve months have passed since David Rawiri Kuka's voice was silenced. |
The father-of-four was killed in an execution-style shooting in Gate Pa in which police believe Kuka was targeted by mistake. |
Tonight, his family plan to hold a candle-lit vigil outside the Wilrose Place address where he died to mark the first anniversary of his death. |
Kuka was last seen playing his guitar at the commercial building, which he used as a workshop for his wood carving. |
Examples of Kuka's work with master carver James Tapiata are dotted around Tauranga - he helped on the Matariki carvings on the Strand, as well as the whare at Tauranga Boys' College - and overseas. |
David Rawiri Kuka was a talented carver whose work is dotted around Tauranga and overseas. Photo / Supplied. |
David Kuka in a pose his family believe many people in Tauranga will recognise. Photo / Supplied. |
"He loved telling stories through carving," says Te Kimiorangi, "he was very talented and loved working with his hands." |
Of Ngai Te Rangi and Ngati Porou descent, her father was one of 10 siblings raised on Matakana Island, then in Greerton. |
Tall and physically imposing, Kuka was a keen rugby player during his school years at Tauranga Boys', but loved music most of all. |
"He was a gentle giant," says Te Kimioranga. |
One particular story of his compassionate nature emerged only after his death. |
About six months earlier, David Kuka saw a young man stumbling along the street in the Tauranga CBD one evening. |
He had been assaulted and Kuka wrapped his own bandannas around the youth's head to stop the bleeding, while calling 111 for help. |
Kuka waited with the young man and called his mother to reassure her, before quietly slipping away when the ambulance arrived. |
The young man's family never had a chance to thank the Good Samaritan - until the mother saw David Kuka waiting to be embalmed in the funeral home where she worked. |
Te Kimioranga Te Kuka rests her hand on a carving by her father, David Kuka, who was fatally shot in Tauranga on 11 February 2018. Photo / Alan Gibson. |
"We had no idea Dad helped that boy, he was so humble," said Te Kimioranga. |
"We didn't know until the mother saw him in the funeral home, it was amazing. He really cared about people." |
Speaking on behalf of the Kuka whanau for the first time since her father's death, Te Kimioranga wanted the public to know her father had nothing to do with drugs or gangs anymore. |
"He had completely turned his life around. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." |
Her assessment is shared by the head of police inquiry, Detective Inspector Lew Warner. |
A dozen officers are still working on the investigation and Warner said police have found no reason for anyone to target David Kuka - a religious man who told off his neighbours for swearing. |
"There's nothing we can find to that would be a reason to murder him. It was a straight out execution" said Warner. |
"We believe he's a victim of mistaken identity." |
One line of inquiry being followed by the homicide inquiry team is whether Kuka was mistaken for someone else in connection to a fatal shooting at the same Wilrose Place address in January 2018. |
The workshop in Gate Pa, Tauranga where David Kuka was found dead on 11 February 2018. Photo / George Novak. |
Lance Wayne Waite, 58-year-old Mongrel Mob member, later died from his injuries in the Tauranga Hospital. |
A 27-year-old man has pleaded not guilty to murdering Waite and is scheduled to stand trial in May. |
Twelve months later, Warner says police cannot rule out a link between the violent deaths of Waite and Kuka. |
"We're still investigating that scenario as well as many others." |
A silver sedan, captured in security camera footage, is still considered important to the inquiry. |
Warner revealed new information about the car: the vehicle had been seen in the Welcome Bay area before - and after - the fatal shooting of Kuka shortly before 10pm on 11 February 2018. |
A silver sedan of interest to the police investigation was also seen in Welcome Bay before and after the murder. Photo / Supplied. |
A silver sedan is of interest to the police investigating the death of David Kuka in Gate Pa, Tauranga in February 2018. Photo / Supplied. |
Police investigating death of David Kuka are interested in any information about this silver sedan. Photo / Supplied. |
He urged anyone who recognised the car or had other information, to come forward and help give closure to the Kuka family. |
"We really want to do the right thing by David. And by David's family," said Warner. |
"I think his family is owed the right to know this has all taken place. We're really strongly focused on getting a result for them." |
Leading two Foxton dogs have won over $250,000 combined. |
This spring, almost a decade after its difficult birth, the joint Cambodian-UN tribunal set up to prosecute the officials who orchestrated the Khmer Rouge’s worst crimes seemed finally to be gaining momentum. In February, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia sentenced Duch, the head of the regime’s most... |
Outside the courtroom, though, a crisis was erupting. On the very first day of Duch’s testimony, a Swiss judge tasked with investigating other former Khmer Rouge officials resigned, citing “egregious dysfunctions” at the court. As a mixed tribunal, the ECCC performs its most important functions—investigating, prosecuti... |
Behind this story of remarkable breakthroughs and confounding setbacks stands Cambodia’s protean leader, Hun Sen, one of the longest-serving prime ministers in the world. Hun Sen has long been keen to go down in history as the man who brought the surviving leaders of the Pol Pot regime to justice. But as a one-time Khm... |
No less responsible for the ECCC’s zigzagging course are the UN, which co-runs the court, and the court’s major donors: Japan, the European Union, Australia, and the United States. The ECCC’S foreign backers have largely let Hun Sen have his way, despite much talk of accountability and universal values. They, too, seem... |
Although international criminal tribunals often serve the specific needs of a few powerful players, the Khmer Rouge tribunal may stand apart for so effectively dispensing justice in the service of political expediency. The ECCC may have the formal trappings of an independent institution, but it is best understood as th... |
When in 1997 Hun Sen asked the UN for help setting up a court to try the Khmer Rouge, he had already distinguished himself as a master political operator. Though he had been a mid-level Khmer Rouge cadre, in 1977 he defected from the movement to Vietnam, Cambodia’s enemy at the time. Two years later, when the Vietnames... |
Then the USSR collapsed, and by 1990, Vietnam, a Soviet ally, had withdrawn from Cambodia. Over the next few years, the UN helped broker a peace settlement; Cambodia was to become a model for state reconstruction. In 1993, elections were held. From those Hun Sen once again reemerged at the top, first as co-prime minist... |
It was the late 1990s, and remnant factions of the Khmer Rouge were still waging sporadic attacks on government forces. One of Hun Sen’s strategies was to bring some of these groups over to the government’s side; in 1996, he even obtained a royal amnesty for Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary. But he knew that form... |
Hun Sen’s plan was to have only the Khmer Rouge’s leading figures prosecuted; the movement’s lower officials and rank and file would be reintegrated into Cambodian society, no questions asked. But he faced one particular challenge: how to separate out the members of Pol Pot’s “genocidal clique”—as goes a still-favored ... |
Drawing that line has been tricky. Cambodia’s current finance minister and deputy prime minister, Keat Chhon, worked in the Khmer Rouge’s foreign ministry—under Ieng Sary, who is now on trial despite the 1996 amnesty—and occasionally acted as an interpreter for Pol Pot. Heng Samrin, the chairman of the National Assembl... |
There’s also the troubling story of Hor Nam Hong, Cambodia’s long-time foreign minister. He was ambassador to Cuba in the early 1970s; Pol Pot’s people called him home, arrested him upon arrival, and sent him to Boeung Trabek, a reeducation camp for diplomats in Phnom Penh. But he was spared—reportedly thanks to the in... |
And then there is Hun Sen himself. In 1975, he headed a battalion that oversaw a brutal crackdown against the Cham, a Muslim minority group in Cambodia that opposed the Khmer Rouge. He has said that he sat out the attack in a hospital, recovering from earlier battle injuries. Historians have yet to contradict him, but ... |
With so few degrees of separation between the crimes of yesterday and the leaders of today, establishing the ECCC was predictably tortuous. It wasn’t difficult for the Cambodian government to agree with the UN and other international negotiators that the tribunal should prosecute genocide, war crimes, crimes against hu... |
Even more controversial was the question of who would be prosecuted. In December 1999, with negotiations still under way, Hun Sen announced that only four or five members of the Khmer Rouge regime would be tried. His short list did not include Pol Pot, who had died in 1998, but it included Duch, who had just been arres... |
Yet correspondence from that time reveals that top UN lawyers repeatedly suggested it was up to the Cambodian government to define the court’s reach. Throughout 2000, they variously wrote to Sok An, who is today arguably Hun Sen’s most powerful deputy prime minister, that determining the ECCC’s ambit was “an internal C... |
Duch’s trial (known as “Case 001”) and the investigation against the leaders (“Case 002”) proceeded largely as expected. These were the uncontroversial files, after all: everyone involved could get behind trying the regime’s emblematic torturer and its top brass. And so the ECCC stumbled along, overcoming with more or ... |
The court struggled with low-level corruption and an elaborate kickback scheme benefiting a senior administrator. There was also resistance from the Cambodian government whenever the investigating judges came too close. In 2009 six witnesses who had been subpoenaed to talk about Case 002 simply refused to meet the judg... |
When it came to other suspects—names not on Hun Sen’s original list—it was a different story. Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, the Swiss judge who resigned this spring because of “constant and active opposition” from his Cambodian counterpart, was trying to investigate the five mid-level Khmer Rouge officials targeted in Cases... |
This wasn’t a very plausible threat: most Khmer Rouge fighters are now well into their 50s or older and were disarmed years ago. But the hyperbole revealed both Hun Sen’s real unease and his skill at manipulating the court to placate his cronies in the ruling party. The suspects in Case 003—Meas Mut, the Khmer Rouge’s ... |
Taking the hint, the Cambodian prosecutor and the Cambodian investigating judge, You Bunleng, quickly found legal obstacles to slow Cases 003 and 004 to a crawl. At first, the UN and the court’s foreign backers hardly complained; they were focused on seeing through the cases against Duch and the senior leaders. And as ... |
This was a puzzling decision. A considerable amount of evidence already suggested that the two suspects, Meas Mut and Sou Met, had orchestrated vast purges within their ranks. And documents made public during Duch’s trial indicated that Sou Met had transferred prisoners into Duch’s custody to be tortured and executed. ... |
Whatever the judge’s logic–-and officially no one knew what it was since he hadn’t made any public statements—diplomats from donor countries didn’t seem particularly troubled. The week I saw Blunk, Stephen Rapp, the US Ambassador-At-Large for War Crimes Issues, was in Phnom Penh for the official opening of the trial in... |
When Blunk eventually did resign, last October, it was just days before a procedural ruling criticizing him for secretly backdating orders under appeal. He looked worse than ever. Still, the UN and the ECCC’s foreign backers showed little interest in examining his work. During a special visit to Cambodia, the UN’s top ... |
By early this year, it was difficult to imagine how Cases 003 and 004 might proceed. Still, Kasper-Ansermet, the Swiss judge who had replaced Blunk in December, threw himself into the task; he even tweeted about wanting to do the job right. Immediately he got into trouble. Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy, on w... |
Scheffer, who is now the UN Secretary-General’s special adviser to the court, promptly protested that by getting in Kasper-Ansermet’s way the Cambodian government was breaching the ECCC’s foundational treaty. The Secretary-General’s office added that this was sufficient legal ground for the UN to pull out of the entire... |
Then, in February, the appeals chamber of the court issued its final verdict against Duch. Touted as a historic victory for the Khmer Rouge’s victims, the decision was more remarkable for delivering everything Hun Sen and his supporters might have wanted. It took a severe position—at least by international standards—ag... |
Duch had appealed the sentence of the court’s trial chamber by claiming, somewhat implausibly, that he was not among “those most responsible.” The appeals judges might simply have ruled that he was: after all, he did supervise the killing of more than 12,000 people. But in the final verdict they claimed instead that it... |
This was extraordinary. Judges rarely give up the prerogative to determine the scope of their own authority and in this instance abdicating that power would have major implications. Considering Hun Sen’s adamant opposition to these cases, it was also hard not to interpret the appeals judges’ decision as a political con... |
Preventing the court from embarking on more investigations remains a paramount concern for Hun Sen, who continues to consolidate his power. Cambodia currently chairs ASEAN, and it is trying to secure a seat as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council. There were local elections in June—dominated by the CPP—and ... |
At the same time, the UN and the court’s international backers are likely to continue invoking high-minded principles while disavowing their unspoken understandings with the Cambodian government. Having come this far on Case 002—and paid much of the $160 million or so tab the court has racked up since 2006—they won’t w... |
The trial judges also added that such accusations by the government would not influence them in “the exercise of their duties.” This assurance, which would have been unnecessary at a properly functioning tribunal, sounded more like an entreaty to ECCC watchers: please believe that this made-to-measure court can be impa... |
The above text has been amended. It originally stated that Hor Nam Hong was “ambassador to Cuba for the regime of General Lon Nol,” which is incorrect, and that Ieng Sary was a “former schoolmate” of Hor Nam Hong, which remains unclear. |
Following the publication of this article, the NYRblog published an exchange between the author and a spokesperson of Cambodia’s Foreign Ministry; and a separate response from Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hor Nam Hong. |
Lee Chase and Jeff Motch of Blind Lady Tavern started this up in 2011 as part of their campaign “to have a meeting place like this every two or three blocks.” (Motch’s words.) Sure seems to be working in this woody, frontier-looking barn. Friday nights are ker-razy. Menu’s kind of honest, Gold Rush–era, sandwichy, Germ... |
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