Souped-up immune cells force leukaemia into remission(newscientist.com)
newscientist.com
Souped-up immune cells force leukaemia into remission
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22613-soupedup-immune-cells-force-leukaemia-into-remission.html
2 comments
I often comment on "promising" cancer therapies around here when people get too caught up in the hyperbole of press releases. This one however is a huge deal. For those of you following along at home, note that actual people (very, very sick people) who had basically no hope using standard care had their cancer obliterated. Note that the subjects were not rodents (we have cured rodent cancer a million times) and that at least some of the people have no detectable cancer anymore. Having worked in oncology research and development in pharma, I can tell you that outcomes are never this dramatic with patient populations like this one. This is true personalized medicine. It's straight out of science fiction. The science is crazy hard and the fact that it worked is just incredible to me. There are millions of ways this could have failed (and U. Penn is no stranger to the painful failure of gene therapy firsthand in the past). (Disclaimer: I work at an institution involved in the treatment, but have nothing to do with it at all).
I just meet a 25 year old guy, at the hospital whose leukemia had gone into remission using stem cells from his sister. His description of the whole process sounded seriously like science fiction to me.
Having a family member who is going through an experimental treatment at the moment, all I can say is, even if the outcomes (in reality) are hopeless, there are many families out there just grateful that options exist.
Thanks for putting this into perspective. I think most have gotten a little cynical about posts like this.
So now I'm all intrigued, but the article isn't working (502 error), any links to other sources?
So now I'm all intrigued, but the article isn't working (502 error), any links to other sources?
This appears to build on similar work using modified T-cells against Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia from back in 2005 [1]
Fascinating stuff and it seems like all of the leukemias may fall to a strategy like this one.
One of the advantages of the use of this treatment in CLL was that patients were 'immunised' against recurrence of the cancer in the future. It seems that it is not yet known if this is the case for the treatment discussed here.
Nice to see that work is progressing by leaps and bounds in this area.
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849
Fascinating stuff and it seems like all of the leukemias may fall to a strategy like this one.
One of the advantages of the use of this treatment in CLL was that patients were 'immunised' against recurrence of the cancer in the future. It seems that it is not yet known if this is the case for the treatment discussed here.
Nice to see that work is progressing by leaps and bounds in this area.
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849
I got the impression from Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer that (aside from a few minor skin cancers) Leukemia has always been the easiest cancer to attack and study, since it shows up in the blood. But it's been a damn long road from early successes almost 70 years ago.
Thanks for the reference - as someone with CLL you can't imagine what went through my head when I read about this and wondered how transferable the treatment would be to other blood cancers.
I hope they hurry up and bring it to the mass market.. I really hope that it will be available for you to use.