Researchers Successfully Fight Colon Cancer Using Immunotherapy (nytimes.com)

Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the New York Times: The remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer, after treatment with cells from her own immune system, may lead to new options for thousands of other patients with colon or pancreatic cancer, researchers are reporting. (Shorter non-paywalled version of the article here). Her treatment was the first to successfully target a common cancer mutation that scientists have tried to attack for decades... so resistant to every attempt at treatment that scientists have described it as "undruggable"... The researchers analyze tumors for mutations -- genetic flaws that set the cancer cells apart from normal ones. They also study tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, looking for immune cells that can recognize mutations and therefore attack cancerous cells but leave healthy ones alone.
The patient, a 50-year-old database programmer in Michigan, is now cancer-free, according to the article. "Researchers twice denied her request to enter the clinical trial, saying her tumors were not large enough, she said. But she refused to give up and was finally let in."

The treatment ultimately eliminated six of her seven tumors, and because it targeted a cell mutation that's common in colon cancer patients, "Researchers say they now have a blueprint that may enable them to develop cell treatments for other patients as well."

Comments

Re:Old technology...

[nbauman]

I'm pretty sure techniques very similar to this have been available in France for more than a decade. So maybe the story should be that the slow U.S. regulatory process for medical procedures is a decade behind as opposed to framing it as brand new cutting-edge technology.

Not true. I follow French medical science -- everybody in medicine does. Much of their work is excellent, but they don't hide it. They talk about it at international conferences and publish their results in major journals. Like everything else in medicine, when the French come up with a good idea, the rest of the world picks it up.

For that matter, when a French scientist comes up with a good idea, graduate students all over the world want to study in his lab, just like French grad students want to study in other labs worldwide. So a lot of the cutting-edge work is by international teams. You can see that by searching Youtube for Dance Your PhD http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Cancer immunology is a big field. Everybody's trying to make it work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Bone marrow transplants (actually blood cell transplants) are standard now for some leukemias, and fairly effective. This specific treatment has never been done before, not in France, or anywhere.

It's also not true that the European regulatory agencies approve drugs faster than the US FDA:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
The 21st Century Cures Act â" Will It Take Us Back in Time?
Jerry Avorn and Aaron S. Kesselheim
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:2473-2475
June 25, 2015
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1506964

An underlying premise of the bill is the need to accelerate approval for new products, but this process is already quite efficient. A third of new drugs are currently approved on the basis of a single pivotal trial; the median size for all pivotal trials is just 760 patients. More than two thirds of new drugs are approved on the basis of studies lasting 6 months or less â" a potential problem for medications designed to be taken for a lifetime. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts its review, it approves new medications about as quickly as any regulatory agency in the world, evaluating nearly all new drug applications within 6 to 10 months, an impressive turnaround for such complex assessments.

Re:Never understood some trial criteria

[nbauman]

In this case, they were surgically removing large tumors that were infiltrated with T cells.

The T cells normally attack cancer cells, but they couldn't do it because the cancer cells had established a defense mechanism.

They were trying to overcome the death mechanism and train the T cells to attack the cancer.

For that they needed big tumors with a lot of T cells.

At first, they did a biopsy of her tumors to see whether she had enough T cells to make the treatment work. She didn't have enough T cells. If they had tried it, even if their theory was correct, the treatment would have failed.

Then her x-rays showed that her tumor had grown, so her doctor sent them in to the researchers. They did another biopsy, and she had a lot of T cells infiltrating the tumor -- enough to make the treatment work. That's why they accepted her in the trial.

I'm writing this from memory. I read the paper and a few articles about it, but I'm not going to read it again.

Saddly, yes: elite-only for now.

[DrYak]

Saddly,
that's currently what it seems.

(for the TL;DR version of people who don't want to plow through dozens of PubMed articles:
- basically these "cure any cancer" methods consist of growing specially designed immune cell that are specific for the cancer and only will attack it while leaving the body intact.
- Achieving it requires a whole university complex of genomics, proteomics, culture-cell growing and selection, etc. and is in the range of million-worth per cure.
- In addition the the cost and the facilities it doesn't even *scale* beyond a few experimental patients - even if 50 billionaires decided to throw the money, the could only be cured one at a time)

But the general proof of concept works.

And perhaps one day, after a few "Oxford Minion" and "CRISPR/Cas9"-like revolutions down the line, new technology might get developed that brings this out of the "designer medicine for the most outrageously wealthy elite" domain and bring it within reach of normal people.

(Well maybe "normal people who live in countries featuring a decent public health system". Sorry for you USA... maybe you could try to flee to one of those evil-communist countries like Canada or most of Europe ?)