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MINNEAPOLIS—Researchers used five billion copies of a
single immune cell from a man to wipe out signs of his
advanced melanoma for more than two years, according to
a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Copies of an infection-fighting CD4 T
cell were grown in a laboratory, and then used to attack
the 52-year-old patient’s tumor, the report said.
Previously, scientists had difficulty isolating and
copying immune system cells, the researchers wrote in
the report.
The man had recurrent melanoma that
failed to respond to therapy or surgery when he enrolled
in a clinical trial at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center in Seattle. The disease had spread to
his lungs and a lymph node before he received the
two-hour infusion of the lab-grown immune-system cells.
Sixty days later, all signs of the disease were gone. He
remained in remission for the following two years,
researchers said.
“We were surprised by the antitumor
effect of these CD4 T cells and its duration of
response,” said Cassian Yee, the senior author of the
paper and an associate member of the clinical research
division, in a statement. “For this patient we were
successful, but we would need to confirm the
effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”
Researchers said the approach might
allow them to fight cancer with safer and less invasive
methods than the surgery, radiation and chemotherapy
medications that are often used. If the new approach is
successful in trials, it may be used to treat 25 percent
of all patients with late-stage melanoma similar to the
disease in the study, Yee said.
The patient had no signs of cancer after
two years, when he requested not to be contacted further
by researchers or the media, Yee said in a telephone
interview. He is still alive and says the disease hasn’t
returned, according to Yee.
Eight other people have been given the
treatment, including as recently as a month ago. The
severe condition, which usually kills people within a
year, stopped spreading in some of the test patients,
though it’s too early to tell if any will respond as
well as the man whose cancer was halted, Yee said.
The patient didn’t receive any treatment
other than the cloned infection-fighting T cells. He
also didn’t take any drugs or undergo any treatments
designed to prepare his body for the process, the
researchers said. Cancer patients sometimes endure
intensive treatment to condition their bodies for a new
therapy or to help lengthen the time it works.
Bloomberg |
