I read an article today on Yahoo News that seems remarkably free of the quackery that accompanies most supposed cancer cures. Now of course the sample size is tiny (3 people in total) and the results aren’t conclusive yet (one patient still has some cancer) but it looks very promising to me. Has anyone heard of this treatment method and if it is indeed as promising as it appears?
Perhaps this is a major breakthrough and I certainly hope so.
I look forward to the day when our current radiation treatment will be considered out of date and barbaric.
The article as published in The New England Journal of Medicine, August 10, 2011 (10.1056/NEJMoa1103849).
Thanks for posting the links. Very interesting article!
Interesting links, thanks DWMarch and Toucanna! 
Both of the articles (esp. the NEJoM) seem to offer new hope for victims of cancer.
It’s way too soon to start calling it a cure though, IMHO. :dubious:
But it does sound promising. We can only hope and pray that the newly discovered method turns out to be as effective in the long run, as it looks to be in the initial stages of research.
Note of caution - this has only worked in three people with one very particular type of cancer, namely chronic lymphocytic leukemia. There are tons of different kinds of cancer, and we have no reason to believe this will work on all of them, much less even other forms of leukemia. Leukemia is specifically a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, so I suspect it is better suited for this kind of treatment.
I presume Ferret Herder to mean that it is well suited as a treatment for blood based cancer since the treatment is to inject ninja T cells into the blood stream. If it was lung cancer, for example, there wouldn’t be such a clean connection between the cure and the disease.
Again, it’s a therapy for one specific type of leukemia. We don’t know if remission for these patients will be permanent, if resistance will develop (or the cancer-fighting cells die out) or if previously unknown side effects will develop.
Larger-scale trials and time will tell.
I just wince every time I see something being touted as “a/the cure for cancer,” due to the nature of the condition. To the best of my understanding, there almost certainly will never be one single “magic bullet” that will wipe out every kind of cancer.
That’s very true. “Cancer” is really a catch-all term for a multitude of diseases that happen to share one characteristic: uncontrolled cell growth. Every cancer is essentially unique. Even a single type of cancer, as identified by clinical oncologists, is really a collection of independent cell proliferation diseases that just happen to share some characteristics. There are drugs, targeting a particular genetic mechanism, that can block the growth of certain tumors while accelerating the growth of others.
I have to be a productive human being now, but I can talk about the pitfalls and drawbacks of this particular treatment later.
But I should say that this is a really cool result, and it’s a wonderful thing even if it only turns out to cause temporary remission in a subset of patients with a particular type of cancer.
Isn’t the jist of what they did is reprogram some white blood cells so that it would trigger an autoimmune response against the cancer cell? If that’s the case I’d guess it wouldn’t work against brain cancers. (Since I’m under the impression the immune system doesn’t get to play around in your brain.) Still it seems like it could work on a lot of cancers as long as the cancer cells can be differentiated from healthy cells. (But that’s always the gotcha isn’t it?)
Just came in to say a) nice username/post combo, and b) I share FerretHerder’s wince. The “just happen to share some characteristics” is the best phrasing of why that I’ve come across in a while.
Still: hope. Science and progress march ever onward.
The editor summary in the Science Translational Medicine is quite enthusiastic and puts this study in a wider perspective.
In other words, it is not just that they have three patients which took the cure and later appeared to be healed. It is also that they have demonstrated the possibility of using T cells to target (a given type of) cancer. So, even if the miracle cure is not necessarily ready yet, there is at least some significant technical progress here.
It’s amazing how “treatable” the leukemias are becoming. I have a friend who 15 years ago would have died from chronic myelogenous leukemia within months had she not been able to obtain a bone marrow transplant from a donor (her brother, as it happened). Since then, the Philadelphia Chromosome has been understood, and many patients with CML can simply take a daily pill now containing tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Other leukemia patients can be put into remission using their own filtered stem cells rather than bone marrow donations. And now this. It’s rather cool! 
For that matter, there are many types of cancer we can already cure, with varying degrees of success. Even if leukemia (or a particular sub-variety thereof) gets added to the list, there will still be plenty of other cancers.
This is really the key, and may not actually be solved by this method. Reading the abstract from the NEJM article, it sounds like the basically trained the T-cells to attack all cells that expressed the gene CD19, and that this gene expressed by both malignant and normal B-cells (a type of immune cell). So basically they started an auto immune response against part of the immune system wiping it all out.
I’m not a clinical biologist but from reading this I assume that presumably even with the total elimination of all B-cells the patient can be relatively well.
For this to be applied to other tumor types there would need to me a genetic marker that occurs only in the tumor cell, and not in any cell that the patient actually needs. So a possible cure for some cancer, and CLL in particular, but probably not for all cancer.
Help me out here: is the idea that the normal B cells eventually “come back” i.e. after the treatment is stopped, the body produces a new batch … but the tumor has been eradicated? Is that the idea?
Or do the normal B cells not regenerate or whatever?
As if the known side-effects weren’t bad enough. Excepted from the NEJoM article:
“Clinical Response and Evaluations
Fourteen days after the first infusion, the patient began having chills and low-grade fevers associated with grade 2 fatigue. Over the next 5 days, the chills intensified, and his temperature escalated to 39.2°C (102.5°F), associated with rigors, diaphoresis, anorexia, nausea, and diarrhea. He had no respiratory or cardiac symptoms…The tumor lysis syndrome was diagnosed on day 22 after infusion…There was evidence of acute kidney injury… The patient was hospitalized and treated with fluid resuscitation and rasburicase. The uric acid level returned to the normal range within 24 hours, and the creatinine level within 3 days; he was discharged on hospital day 4. The lactate dehydrogenase level decreased gradually, becoming normal over the following month.” (Emphasis and in-line link are mine.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad this treatment worked for the patient(s) involved, I just want to point out the treatment was no walk in the park for him/them.
I’m trying to remember back to a cell bio class I took years ago about this. So from what I remember B-Cells are the cells that produce antibodies. (I’ll take a guess if you stopped producing antibodies you’d probably die.) Anyway your body at first produces a batch of naive B-Cells. Basically they don’t “know” how to make an antibody.(They have the generic instructions how to produce an antibody but it’s not in a form that produces a useful antibody.) However they can snip out parts of their DNA plus re-arrange other parts to in effect reprogram their DNA (don’t ask me how they know when to do this though) and the end of this process they produce some antibody which may or may not be useful.
Anyway after this point the reprogrammed B-Cells can do a couple of things. If they’re actively pumping out antibodies they’re called plasma cells. They can also convert into something called a memory cell. (It’s a B-Cell who’s job it is to make more B-Cells that produce a specific antibody.) If the memory cells are busy making more cells then they go hang out until they’re needed. (Which is why when you get infected once with something you can fight it off the second time. The memory cells “wake up” start pumping out plasma cells and the plasma cells produce the specific antibody.)
Anyway I could take a guess that even if you wiped out all the currently differentiated B-Cells as long as your body is producing new naive B-Cells you’d be ok. (Which is what I think happens. I mean your bone marrow contains loads of hematopoietic stem cell and they turn into various types of blood cells such as B-Cells.)
The news is remarkable specifically because it seems to be working on lymphocytic leukemia, which is currently arguably the most difficult cancer to treat.