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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.”
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.
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
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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