Sean Adl-Tabatabai – A revolutionary type of immunotherapy has seen terminal cancer patients recover “within a matter of days,” according to a new clinical trial.
CART T-cell therapy eradicates tumors in nearly all patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who had exhausted other treatment options, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have reported.
Time.com reports: What makes immune-based therapies like CAR T cell therapy so promising–and so powerful–is that they are a living drug churned out by the patients themselves. The treatment isn’t a pill or a liquid that has to be taken regularly, but a one-hit wonder that, when given a single time, trains the body to keep on treating, ideally for a lifetime.
“This therapy is utterly transformative for this kind of leukemia and also lymphoma,” says Stephan Grupp, director of the cancer immunotherapy program at CHOP and one of the lead doctors treating patients in the study in which Kaitlyn participated.
Eager to bring this groundbreaking option to more patients, including those with other types of cancers, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously in July to move the therapy beyond the testing phase, during which several hundred people have been able to take advantage of it, to become a standard therapy for children with certain leukemias if all other treatments have failed. While the FDA isn’t obligated to follow the panel’s advice, it often does, and it is expected to announce its decision in a matter of weeks. Continue reading
It takes no more than 100 seconds for the body’s immune cells to identify and kill a cancer cell. Immune cells undergo ‘spontaneous’ changes on a daily basis that could lead to cancers if not for the diligent surveillance of our immune system, Melbourne scientists have found.