When Milton Wright III got his third cancer diagnosis, he cried until he laughed. He was 20 and had survived leukemia twice before, first when he was eight and again as a teen. Each time he’d suffered through years of punishing chemotherapy.Read more here.
But now he had checked himself in to Seattle Children’s Hospital. An aspiring model, he had taken a fall before a photo shoot and found he couldn’t shake off the pain in his ribs. When the doctors started preparing him for a spinal tap, he knew the cancer was back. “I said, Oh, man, they are going to tell me I relapsed again,” he recalls. “They’re going to give me my six months.”
The third time wasn’t good, he knew. He’d seen enough sick kids at the Ronald McDonald House to know that when leukemia comes back like this, it’s usually resistant to chemotherapy. Hardly anyone survives.
An immune cell treatment is prepared at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan.
Top: A bioreactor bag holds a leukemia patient’s T cells. The cells have been genetically modified to fight cancer. A new receptor has been added.
Middle: A sample of a patient’s T cells is prepared for quality tests.
Bottom: A bottle of nutrients is used to feed the T cells, which are grown for about 10 days, until they number in the billions. Then they can be reinfused into a patient’s veins.
But Wright did. In 2013 his cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, was destroyed with a new type of treatment in which cells from his immune system, called T cells, were removed from his blood, genetically engineered to target his cancer, and then dripped back into his veins.
The T-cell therapies are the most radical of several new approaches that recruit the immune system to attack cancers. An old idea that once looked like a dead end, immunotherapy has roared back with stunning results in the last four years. Newly marketed drugs called checkpoint inhibitors are curing a small percentage of skin and lung cancers, once hopeless cases. More than 60,000 people have been treated with these drugs, which are sold by Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The treatments work by removing molecular brakes that normally keep the body’s T cells from seeing cancer as an enemy, and they have helped demonstrate that the immune system is capable of destroying cancer.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Proving that the immune system is capable of destroying cancer cells
Antonio Regalado writes in MIT Technology Review
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1 comment:
alas it didn't work for my sister in law. Her malignant melanoma came back with a vengence a year after her primary lesion was removed...since she was terminal we got her in a study in Manila that worked with drug companies using this type of treatment. She lived six months. Of course without the treatment I doubt she would have lived a month, and if the conventional chemo worked (which is usually doesn't) she might have lived three months, so I guess it did work.
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