Remarkable New Immunotherapy Treatment Helps Cure Advanced Stage Breast Cancer in Woman in U.S.

The team at the U.S. National Cancer Institute say that an immunotherapy treatment used on a woman suffering from advanced stage breast cancer with barely months to live, has helped her keep cancer away for two years.

Judy Perkins from Florida had been given three months to live by her doctors, but two years later there is no sign of cancer in her body. She had tennis ball-sized tumours in her liver and secondary cancers throughout her body, as reported by the BBC.

Doctors at the U.S. National Cancer Institute concluded that Perkins wouldn’t survive with conventional therapy and as a result picked her for a radical new therapy which harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours.

The treatment involves a highly personalized approach and a patient’s tumor is genetically analyzed to “identify the rare changes that might make the cancer visible to the immune system.”

Then researchers screen the patient’s white blood cells and extract those cells which are capable of attacking the cancerous cells. These same white blood cells are then grown in labs in massive quantities. These were then injected into the patient’s body. In Perkin’s case, 90 billion cancer-killing immune cells were pumped into her body.

Perkins said that she could feel the tumors shrinking within the first week of the white blood cells having been pumped into her body. In less than three weeks, the cancer was completely eradicated from her body.

Dr. Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, told the BBC: "We're talking about the most highly personalised treatment imaginable."

However, these are the results from a single patient and much larger trials will be needed to confirm the findings. The challenge so far in cancer immunotherapy is it tends to work spectacularly for some patients, but the majority do not benefit.

Dr. Rosenberg added, "This is highly experimental and we're just learning how to do this, but potentially it is applicable to any cancer." "At lot of works needs to be done, but the potential exists for a paradigm shift in cancer therapy - a unique drug for every cancer patient - it is very different to any other kind of treatment."

During his final State of the Union address in January, President Barack Obama  had announced an initiative focused on precision medicine — the vision that one day, all people will be offered customized care, with treatments that match our genetics and personal histories. Such individualized therapies promise to be more effective and cause fewer side effects than more traditional ones developed for the average patient.

The immunotherapy treatment remains experimental and still requires considerably more testing before it can be used more widely.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 05, 2018 10:34 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).