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."

Comments

I hope this is available for everyone eventually

[bjdevil66]

The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.

Re:the future is bleak (if you're male)

[Junta]

I know this is a troll, but to react with data, there's good reason breast cancer gets so much more attention, it's 44 times more likely to happen to a person under 40 than prostate cancer is.

Also, as noted by others, prostate, ovarian, and breast cancer have been considered in the same boat with respect to being tricking for immunology based approaches for treatment, so if this is validation of a procedure rather than a lucky one-off, this would be fantastic news for people worried about prostate cancer as well.

Re:I hope this is available for everyone eventuall

[gijoel]

Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care.

I would have thought that this is the reason universal health care exist. To purchase health care that would be beyond the average person's reach. I'd also point out that government health agencies have greater bargaining power than an individual, and are able to knock down price gouging by massive corporations.

Or let me put it another way. I have a cure for your fatal disease. You and everyone who loves you must give me everything they own, and take on crippling debt to get it.

Re:Why this will often fail

[Ungrounded Lightning]

In some cases, they've developed vaccines that cause the immune system to target specific mutations. I've seen before and after photos of an amazing recovery. The problem is that a few months later, the cancer came back, and the patient soon died.

As I understand it:

The (or a) problem with vaccine-initiated attacks on cancers is that there are cell-surface markers that tell the immune system:
"I'm really a cell type that starts producing a surface protein AFTER the immune system is deployed - or maybe a placental cell in a new baby. Don't kill me!" Normally these are only expressed by things like the cells forming myelin sheaths (to keep EVERYBODY from getting Multiple Sclerosis - like symptoms while still a toddler). But wIth a lot of cells in a tumor living beyond the hayflick limit and accumulating mutations, some of them t;urn one one of these markers. The vaccine-induced immune cells knock back the tumors, time out, and when the tumors start to grow back the cells with the markers convince the immune system not to attack any more.

The trick discovered a few years back is to clone the immune cells OUTSIDE the body, where they don't see that signal, until they're past the point of paying attention to it, then injecting a massive army of such cells. The tumor cells say "I'm OK, don't kill me!" The soldiers say "ORLY?" and kill them anyway.

There have been several attempts at this: They worked fine at killing the tumors. But injecting a big army of immune cells kills enough cancer tissue at once that the fallout inflammatory chemicals tended to kill the patient with something akin to toxic shock syndrome. Recently the medical community tried doing this and then keeping the patient in the hospital and giving them treatments for the toxic shock until the tumors were knocked back far enough that the patient was past the crisis. With a little tuning they got to a regime where THAT worked nicely.

So now they're doing variants against more cancer types - starting, of course, with metastatic, previously incurable (especially in late stages), types that hit a lot of people. Bingo: An advanced breast cancer cure, based on the approach, also succeeds.

Expect this to be the start of a flood of similar treatments for a range of cancers, as they work their way down the list, while tuning and generalizing the procedures.