Melanoma Stopped With 5 Billion Copies of Immune Cell (Update2)
By Michelle Fay Cortez
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Researchers used 5 billion copies of a single cell from a man's immune system to eradicate signs of advanced melanoma for more than two years, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Copies of an infection-fighting CD4 T cell were grown in a laboratory, and then used to attack the 52-year-old patient's tumor, the report said. Previously, scientists had difficulty isolating and copying immune system cells, the researchers wrote in the report.
The man had recurrent melanoma that failed to respond to therapy or surgery when he enrolled in a clinical trial at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The disease had spread to his lungs and a lymph node before he received the two-hour infusion of the lab-grown immune system cells. Sixty days later, all signs of the disease were gone. He remained in remission for the following two years, researchers said.
``We were surprised by the anti-tumor effect of these CD4 T cells and its duration of response,'' said Cassian Yee, the senior author of the paper and an associate member of the clinical research division, in a statement. ``For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.''
Researchers said the approach might allow them to fight cancer with safer and less invasive methods than the surgery, radiation and chemotherapy medications that are often used. If the new approach is successful in trials, it may be used to treat 25 percent of all patients with late-stage melanoma similar to the disease in the study, Yee said.
Still Alive
The patient had no signs of cancer after two years, when he requested not to be contacted further by researchers or the media, Yee said today in a telephone interview. He is still alive and says the disease hasn't returned, according to Yee.
Eight other people have been given the treatment, including as recently as a month ago. The severe condition, which usually kills people within a year, stopped spreading in some of the test patients, though it's too early to tell if any will respond as well as the man whose cancer was halted, Yee said.
The patient didn't receive any treatment other than the cloned infection-fighting T cells. He also didn't take any drugs or undergo any treatments designed to prepare his body for the process, the researchers said. Cancer patients sometimes endure intensive treatment to condition their bodies for a new therapy or to help lengthen the time it works.
Sparked by Treatment
Only about 50 percent to 75 percent of the patient's tumor cells produced the antigen that the laboratory-grown immune system cells targeted. The researchers speculated that his immune response against the tumor was sparked and expanded by the treatment, leading to regression of the entire tumor.
``During regression of the tumor, this clone appears to have induced the patient's own T cells to respond to other antigens of his tumor,'' the researchers concluded. ``These findings support further clinical studies.''
More than 62,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed in 2008 with melanoma, the most common and deadly form of skin cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Almost 8,500 patients will die from it this year.
To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in Minneapolis at mcortez@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: June 18, 2008 20:32 EDT |
