In a study conducted by the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute for Cancer Research, scientists found that a combination of two melanoma treatments from Bristol-Meyers Squibb was able to halt cancer progression for up to 12 months in approximately 60% of cancer sufferers. The international trial involved 945 patients receiving a combination of two immunotherapy drugs, ipilimumab and nivolumab.

James Larkin, FRCP, PhD, the UK’s Chief Investigator for numerous clinical trials in cancer-related research, says that combining these two drugs is like “taking two brakes off the immune system [sic] rather than one so the immune system is able to recognize tumors it wasn’t previously recognizing and react to that and destroy them.” (via BBC News) However, it should be noted that the occurrence of side effects such as headache, fatigue, and rash were almost doubled versus treatment with just one of the drugs.

Click here to read more about this research on BBC News.