No, Florent Pagny is not stopping his cancer treatment

in collaboration with

Ivan Pourmir (medical oncologist)

After many months of absence, Florent Pagny will be back in 2025, to once again occupy his seat as coach in The Voiceon TF1. If this comeback will finally take place earlier than expected – he had initially announced a break extending until 2026 – the artist is still fighting lung cancer, which has already had two recurrences.

The disease “keeps coming back,” confides Florent Pagny

The latest news from the 62-year-old singer comes to us following his participation in Dr. Laurent Karila’s podcast, “Addiktion.” In it, he discusses how cannabis helped him overcome his chemotherapy sessions.

Although he assures that “healthwise, things are going well”, Florent Pagny concedes that the disease is still tenacious. “When you are affected by this disease that we call the crab because it clings on, it keeps coming back. Even if the treatments do their job well for a while, it has a tendency to come back. For me, it came back twice after the first, so that makes three times.” describes the singer.

“We enter into a three-month perspective. When she has moved away, we do the checks, we find nothing, it is stable, we always have an appointment in three months. And every three months, you come to see if you are not going back in a direction, or if you can continue in a freedom of life. It is a bit unusual.” he recognizes.

A cessation of treatment, in agreement with his doctors

The artist also announced that he had decided to stop his treatments, in agreement with his doctors. “There is no more treatment. Not even immunotherapy. We realized one day that it wasn’t working, there were relapses, we gave up” says the singer, who adds that he has turned to Chinese medicine for the moment.

What is immunotherapy?

When asked, Dr. Ivan Pourmir explains the main points to us.First of all, it must be remembered that we are talking about immunotherapies, because there are several of them: they are different treatments and different approaches.” the doctor emphasizes. “Among the immunotherapies existing ones, for example, there are anti-tumor vaccines, immune cell transplants… This covers different things”.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors, used in many cancers

According to the specialist, in many cancers, it is immune checkpoint inhibitors that will be used as immunotherapy.

“This protection system is disrupted by the cancer, which puts it to sleep in a way to avoid being attacked. By administering antibodies to the patient, the checkpoint is blocked, which causes the anti-cancer white blood cells to wake up, so that its immune system fight against disease” specifies the expert. “One of the side effects would be the possibility of triggering an autoimmune disease as well, by lifting this protection. This is what we fear.” he concedes.

Immunotherapy is usually given to a patient after or at the same time as conventional treatments such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy.In the case of inoperable but localized lung cancer, the following is generally given: radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the same time, then we start cycles of immunotherapy, i.e. several injections at regular intervals. Generally after a year, we stop it but we are not talking about definitively stopping the treatment” Ivan Pourmir also indicates.

“In the context of metastatic cancer, until recently the rule was to continue it indefinitely as long as it worked. For some time now, the question has been raised about stopping it also in patients whose disease has been controlled for a long time, but this remains experimental. In all cases, the patient remains under medical surveillance and continues to be regularly seen in consultation by doctors.” he concluded.

Slideshow: Why does lung cancer also affect non-smokers?