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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."
What a horrible disease this is. I'm so proud of the scientists working on ways to fight it, and wish them all success.
Actually curing breast cancer is a lot more interesting than anything coming from apple where they do stuff like rationalize removing audio jacks.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.”
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.
“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.”
Hopefully, going back to the routine mundane'ness of life won't delay the completion of her bucket-list or stop her from adding more items. (Enjoy this spinning rock in the vast galaxy while you can.)
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Before anyone asks, we are aware of Apple's developer conference. The company has just unveiled iOS 12, and is describing the new features. Most of the features are yet to be announced, so we will be running that story in about half an hour.
I can't figure out if this was supposed to be a joke or you actually were concerned that people would be upset you posted on a promising cancer treatment instead of Apple product announcements.
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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.
Why would that be?
If my understanding is correct this is not like a drug (chemical or compound) that one simply manufactures. Very specific cells from the individual have to be cultured and selected for genetically. The injection that cures you won't cure me; might very well kill me. To that end this all sounds like 100s of man hours that must be expended by some of the most highly talented, best, educated professionals our society produces and they need to utilize millions of dollars in capital equipment to do the work with to boot.
Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care. We as a society can't make this type of treatment ( until we invent automation and mass production around it ) available to all. We probably need to make it available to some in order for us to advance the state of the art and develop the technology in hopes of a future were everyone get as many of their cancer specific t-cells cloned up while they wait. In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
Yes as an individual it feels unfair when you are not getting the outcome you'd like personally but remember the governments role is to promote the 'general welfare.' Not that it always does a good job of that given the power of certain special intrests.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Not just breast cancer, metastasized cancer.
This is fucking amazing, should be on every front page, everywhere.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...instead of continuing to attach leaches to people.
No, hospital billing departments will continue to exist.
I love how we are more than happy to give the glory to God for creating a cure, but some how we over look that it was God that created the cancers in the first place.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
They're similar. CAR-T is one form of ACT (Adoptive Cell Transfer), which the article names as their method. CAR-T employs CAR (chimeric antibody receptors) toward reengineering T cells only. The variant of ACT used here was TIL (tumor infiltrating lymphocytes) rather than T cells, apparently because this target involves a smaller number of target mutations than is suitable for CAR-T.
(I hope I've interpreted this correctly.)
And yes, this form of ACT should be just as expensive as CAR-T -- about a half million dollars per patient.
There's a nice summary here:
https://www.cancer.gov/news-ev...
right? Give it a few decades (less if we can get people to stop cutting research funds to make way for bigger tax cuts) and you'll see systems that make it so any college grad can whip one of these treatments up in a couple days.
When the manufacturing jobs went away we were all promised jobs in bio-chem. This is what they meant. But of course, you can't have that if only the top 1% get healthcare. I suppose we can have more $8/hr jobs at insurance company call centers to explain why you can't have medical care. I mean, is it a death panel if it's one guy reading from a call center script?
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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.
Wasn't "Keeping the doctor away" the thing that killed Steve Jobs?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
I guess all the sane people have finally abandoned /. for this tripe to be at +5. Amazon makes wealth, Jeff Bezos profits. If he dies of cancer next year they'll continue to make money for his estate and heirs. He'd spend millions if not billions of dollars for a cure, but just because it's his own ass. If you think that's efficient allocation you're on so heavy drugs it's amazing you can write a whole sentence. Excuse me while I go to Breitbart for some quality commentary. Or even 4chan...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The concern people have with the "right to try" legislation is that it makes it much easier for snake oil salesmen to charge desperate patients insane prices for experimental therapies that have not even started to go through any phase 2 trials to determine if they work. (Phase 1 trials just ensure that the drug doesn't kill you faster.)
The problem is, if folks don't go through the compassionate use program, they don't get the legal limitations on price associated with that program. (Compassionate use fees are limited by law to the actual cost of manufacturing and delivering the drug.) So this almost certainly will lead to desperate patients paying extortionate amounts of money to avoid having to wait for an FDA compassionate use sign-off.
The requirement that someone at the FDA sign off on compassionate use approval was there for a reason, and this legislation could cause serious financial harm to the families of people who truly have no hope of surviving regardless of the treatment. If that sign-off process is too slow, the right fix is to speed that up, not to remove an essential step in preventing egregious abuses in the name of profits. This is a very bad law as written, and IMO, the only winners will be drug companies and profiteers.
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I agree that the government shouldn't force equal allocation for all. Better performers should get greater rewards.
And I'm not saying it should be free to everyone just out of the goodness of our hearts. If it costs $30,000-$40,000 (to cover the "hundreds" of man hours + a healthy cut for the company), then that's good business.
I am saying, however, that your "allocation theory" and modern capitalism have been corrupted. The "right" way to sell such a valuable treatment would be to immediately turn that $30-$40K tab into a $100K bill to get the "warrior class" of salespeople/CEOs golden parachutes. Then they charge $110K the next year, and $120K in the 3rd year, and so on - just to drive up a company's stock price in perpetuity above all other concerns.
No matter what modern economic theories can be penned to support this modern version of business capitalism, it still FEELS wrong. It is innately wrong to put your profits first and your customers last - especially when human lives are what's being lost. In that scenario, are those people still behaving like society's "cream of the crop" that should reap the rewards? I'd say no.
To bastardize a quote from Penn and Teller. "God works in mysterious, cruel, inefficient, and inhuman ways."
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
While that is a valid point, so is his. It's reasonable to have some type of regulation on inelastic goods with monopoly protection. Do you really want an economy where a company can sell life and death at any price. This is part of why healthcare is such a difficult problem.
Chris Mesterharm
It shouldn't be outrageously expensive. There is nothing to patent here, therefore no company can run a monopoly and charge what they like. That is the main reason for sky high medical costs.
Yes, it takes some equipment and skilled workers. Provided this works widely, many people can be trained and before long it will just be another assembly line. The same work can be done all over the world if first world labs try to keep it to themselves.
OMG. That is just perfect,:)
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.