US doctors kill skin cancer with cloned T-cells
- From: metspitzer <kilowatt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:00:47 -0500
US doctors have for the first time successfully treated a skin
cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system, a study
released Wednesday showed.
The ground-breaking treatment for advanced melanoma, or skin cancer,
led to a long remission for the patient and used his own cloned
infection-fighting T-cells, said doctor Cassian Yee, the lead author
of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Yee and his associates from the Clinical Research Division at Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a
type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose melanoma had
spread to a groin lymph node and to one of his lungs.
The melanoma was already well advanced and in stage four.
The T-cells which specifically fight melanoma were modified and
expanded in the laboratory and some five billion cells were then
infused into the patient, who received no other kind of treatment.
Two months later no tumors were found during scans of the patient's
organs. And he has been cancer free for two years, Yee said.
"We were surprised by the anti-tumor effect of these CD4 T cells and
its duration of response," Yee said. "For this patient we were
successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy
in a larger study."
It was the first ever case to show that cloned cells from a patient's
own immune system can successful combat skin cancer. If further tests
confirm the efficiency of the method, it could be used in some 25
percent of patients with late-stage skin cancer, the study said.
Using a patient's own immune system to combat cancer, called
immunotherapy, is a growing area of research that aims to develop
less-toxic cancer treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation.
Some 160,000 cases of melanoma are diagnosed around the world every
year, particularly affecting white men living in very sunny regions.
Although it usually affects the skin, in rare cases it can also infect
the eyes and intestines.
According to the World Health Organization, some 48,000 people die
from melanoma every year.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080618212711.38ht6zq0&show_article=1
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