Immune Cell Cloning Cures Cancer
By admin on Jul 10, 2008 in Featured
A patient who was suffering from advanced skin cancer is seemingly cancer-free after doctors treated him with clones of his own immune cells.
The 52-year-old man’s tumours, which had spread to his lungs, disappeared after two months of treatment, scans indicated.
The astonishing outcome is the first solid evidence that the experimental T-cell treatment works.
American scientists pointed out that the breakthrough involved just one patient and said that further trials would be needed to prove that the results were not a fluke.
Advanced malignant melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, is notoriously difficult to treat once it starts to spread.
Cassian Yee, who led a team from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, pioneered a new therapy based on infection-fighting “helper” CD4 T-cells from the patient’s own immune system.
Helper T-cells are specialised white blood cells that identify foreign invaders, or cancerous cells, and marshal other elements of the immune system against them.
The new technique, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved extracting helper T-cells from the patient and cloning those specifically targeting melanoma. They were then stimulated to divide and multiply in the laboratory, boosting their number by up to 5,000 times.
An estimated 5 billion of the lab-grown cells were then infused back into the patient, unaccompanied by any additional therapies.
After two months the patient was found to be tumour-free, and there was still no sign of cancer when he was last checked two years later.
Before treatment, the man had stage 4 advanced melanoma which had spread to a groin lymph node and one of his lungs.
Dr Yee said that he was surprised by the effectiveness of the CD4 T-cells against the tumours.
He added: “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”
The patient had a specific type of immune system, and tumour cells producing a specific antigen. Dr Yee predicted that if the approach proved successful in other patients, it could be used for the 25 per cent of late-stage melanoma sufferers sharing the same profile as the trial patient.
Professor Peter Johnson, the chief clinician of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: “Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone’s own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging.”
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