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Doctors Hail World First as Woman's Advanced Breast Cancer is Eradicated (theguardian.com)
A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours. From a report: It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient's own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body. Judy Perkins, an engineer from Florida, was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas. At the time, she was given three years to live. Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said Perkins's response had been "remarkable": the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that she has now been free of the disease for two years. "My condition deteriorated a lot towards the end, and I had a tumour pressing on a nerve, which meant I spent my time trying not to move at all to avoid pain shooting down my arm. I had given up fighting," Perkins said. "After the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike."
FTA: To create the treatment, doctors first cut small pieces of tissue from Perkins’s tumours and studied the DNA to find mutations specific to her cancer. They focused on mutations that disrupted four genes which produced an array of abnormal proteins in the tumours.
Next, the doctors extracted immune cells known as tumour infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs, from the tumour biopsies. These are cells from the patient’s immune system that have invaded the tumour in a bid to kill it, but which failed in the task by being either too weak or too few in number.
After growing billions of these immune cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which ones would most effectively find and destroy the woman’s cancer cells by recognising their abnormal proteins.
The doctors treated Perkins by injecting 80 billion of the carefully-selected immune cells into her body. The therapy was given alongside pembrolizumab, a standard drug that can help the immune system to attack cancers. Tests after 42 weeks showed Perkins was completely cancer free. She has remained so ever since.
“It feels miraculous, and I am beyond amazed that I have now been free of cancer for two years,” Perkins said.
“I had resigned my job and was planning on dying. I had a bucket-list of things I needed to do before the end, like going to the Grand Canyon,” she added. “Now, I have gone back to normal everyday life.”
While the US doctors who developed the therapy cannot be sure how much the infused immune cells contributed to her recovery, the use of pembrolizumab alone has not been very effective for advanced breast cancer in the past. The infused T cells were found in Perkins’s system for at least 17 months after her treatment began.
The success, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, is all the more remarkable because breast cancers, like prostate and ovarian cancer, have relatively few mutations, which makes them harder for the immune system to spot amid the body’s healthy tissues.
Alan Melcher, professor of translational immunotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who was not involved in the study said: “The work shows that even cancers like breast cancer, which don’t have many antigens, are amenable to this sort of treatment. It would certainly be applicable in principle to a range of tumours, and even those in which immunotherapy hasn’t worked so well yet.”
Immunotherapy is not breast cancer specific. It can be used on most types of cancer.
Cancer is really an immune system malfunction. Most tumors are detected and destroyed by your immune system when they are still microscopic. It is only when the immune system fails that they grow and spread. So it is much better to focus on the root cause by fixing the immune system rather than just trying to kill the tumor with surgery, radiation, or chemicals.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
You knowing what else is so important? Facts. Your last sentence is a complete lie; even without the new legislation, if a terminally ill patient does not qualify for an experimental treatment, they can send a request to the FDA's Expanded Access Program. The FDA approves over 99% of such requests.
This is a very serious, serious matter indeed. Cancer is NO joke.
All women between 18 and say 34 or so should let Doctor AC perform regular breast exams. I'm offering this public service for free to give back to society and victims of cancer. Let your daughter, sister, girlfriend, or wife know today!
Sincerely,
Dr. AC