Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Targeted cellular therapy

Targeted cellular therapy is an extension of long-standing efforts to ramp up the patient’s own immune system to destroy cancer cells. With advances in genetics, doctors can now reconfigure patients’ T cells to target a particular type of cancer cell.

Patients who were suffering from lymphocytic leukemia and had exhausted other treatment options were given targeted cellular therapy.
The researchers, Carl June and David Porter, announced the results recently at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition in New Orleans. After receiving targeted cellular therapy, 26 of 59 patients, including 19 children, are now cancer-free. Patients with the acute form of the cancer, which affects both children and adults, were especially likely to respond positively to treatment.

June and Porter removed the patients’ T cells and genetically “rebuilt” and multiplied them before reintroducing them into the patient’s bloodstream. The weaponized T cells find and destroy all cells with the protein CD19 on their surface, which includes the cancerous B cells found in chronic and acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Patient Doug Olson had long suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, when in 2010 he became one of the first patients to undergo targeted cellular therapy. A few weeks after his treatment, June and Porter could find no cancer cells in Olson’s body.

“The immune system eradicated his tumor. He had pounds — literally pounds — of tumor, and it went away in less than a week. It was an astonishing event that we saw,” June said in a Penn video.

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