Skin Cancer Healed Using Billions of Immune Cells
A skin cancer patient has undergone a full recovery after doctors injected him with billions of his own cloned immune cells.
Doctors say this is a groundbreaking case.
The 52-year-old was suffering from advanced cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs. But within eight weeks of the cell injection he was free of all tumors, and has since lived free of the disease for two years.
Doctors used a process called "immunotherapy", meaning they took the cells in the man’s own defense system that proved to attack the cancer cells best. They were cloned and injected back in his body.
A study released Wednesday from the New England Journal of Medicine revealed the groundbreaking treatment for sending the mans advanced melanoma into remission.
Doctor Cassian Yee, the lead author of the study, says his team from the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell.
 Yee’s team, modified and expanded the T-cells in the laboratory, and then 5 billion were injected into the patient. The man received no other type of treatment.
"We were surprised by the anti-tumor effect of these CD4 T cells and its duration of response," Yee said. "For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study."
Some scientists say the treatment could prove extremely expensive. But if further tests confirm the effectiveness of the method, the study said it could be used in about 25 percent of patients with late-stage skin cancer.
Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said, "This is another interesting demonstration of the huge power of the immune system to fight some types of cancer."
Immunotherapy is a growing area of research that aims to develop less-toxic cancer treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation.
Every year, doctors diagnose 160,000 cases of melanoma around the world, a large number are white men living in extremely sunny regions. Melanoma usually affects the skin, but in rare cases it can also infect the eyes and intestines.
According to the World Health Organization, some 48,000 people die from melanoma every year.
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