A 52-year-old man with advanced melanoma, the lethal form of skin cancer, has been successfully treated using just his own blood.
The development has been hailed by British experts as an “exciting advance” in the use of cancer immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s immune system to fight the disease.
Researchers in the US who were treating the patient extracted white blood cells, the key component of the immune system, and grew one type – the infection-fighting CD4+ T cells – in the laboratory. The cloned T cells, which had been vastly expanded, were then reinfused to the patient to fight the cancer.
The man was diagnosed with stage four melanoma, when death normally occurs within months. The cancer, triggered by sunburn, started in a mole on the skin and had spread to a lymph node in his groin and to his lungs. But, two months after the T-cell treatment, scans revealed no tumour. Two years later, when he was last checked, the man remained free of the disease. He had previously had surgery and drug treatment without any response.
Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, causing 1,800 deaths a year in the UK. It is the fastest rising cancer, with cases up 40 per cent in the past decade. The cancer is caused by intermittent, intense exposure to the sun. The typical victim is the office worker who spends two weeks broiling on a beach each summer. Adults with fair skin who suffered severe sunburn before the age of 15 are at highest risk.
Cassian Yee, who carried out the experimental treatment with colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said that one in four late-stage melanoma patients had the same type of immune system and tumour antigen as the patient, for whom the therapy could be effective. But he warned that they had only proved its success in one patient. “We were surprised by the anti-tumour effect of these CD4+ T cells and its duration of response. For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of the therapy in a larger study.”
Click here to read the rest of this article by Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor – The Independent