New Hope for Cancer Patients
According to a news article from Fox News dated August 11, 2011, a story in both the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine tells us that scientists are reporting clear signs of success by using a new approach to treating those with leukemia.
The study which involved three men with very advanced cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL turned the patient’s own blood cells into assassins that hunt down and destroy the cancerous cells. Sound radical?
The doctors involved agree but it actually seems to have worked as two of the three patients are cancer free a full year later and the third patient has improved drastically although he still has some cancer.
"It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did," said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania who led the study. "We're just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last."
For years scientists have been trying to find a way to help the immune system fight cancer on its own by genetically modifying bloodstream soldiers called T-cells with limited success. Boosting the T-cells works but the modified cells tend to not reproduce and disappear too quickly, usually too quickly to effect a change.
Dr. Carl June and his team decided to make a few changes in the way that the new genes were carried to the T-cells and added a signaling mechanism that told them to multiply and destroy which created a vast army of cells that target cancer cells, destroy them and continues to patrol for new cancer cells to attack.
According to researchers the experience for the patients was fast and drastic. Within 2 weeks of treatment the patients became ill with chills, fever and nausea which occurs when a large number of cancer cells die at the same time.
"It was like the worse flu of their life," June said. "But after that, it's over. They're well."
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