Immune System Trained To Kill Cancer: New T-Cell Therapy

Three new studies presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that reprogramming a patients' own immune cells help in targeting specific molecules in cancer that lead to high rates of remission. The T-cell immunotherapy produced incredible results with leukemia patients, sending the majority of them into remission, researchers say.

One study showed that 94 percent of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) saw their symptoms vanish completely, according to The Guardian. Those with other types of blood cancers also showed response rates grater than 80 percent and up to half experienced complete remission. 

"Essentially what this process does is it genetically reprograms the T-cell to seek out and recognize and destroy the patient's tumor cells," Dr. Stanley Riddell, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said via the BBC. "[The patients] were really at the end of the line in terms of treatment options and yet a single dose of this therapy put more than ninety percent of these patients in complete remission where we can't detect any of these leukemia cells."

The studies were conducted at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute, and at the Technical University of Munich and the results work by removing T-cells from patients, altering targets for specific cancers and then injecting them back into patients, according to UPI.

While researchers note that further studies will be needed regarding the longevity of the treatement, Dr. Vhiara Bonini, a hematologist at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute, notes that a long-term treatment invovling the modified memory of T-cells to automatically attack cancer involves training the modified memory of T-cells to automatically attack cancer it was trained for earlier would ultimately be the best solution. 

"This is really a revolution," Bonini added, via The Guardian. "T-cells are a living drug, and in particular they have the potential to persist in our body for our whole lives."

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