A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours.
It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.
Judy Perkins, an engineer from Florida, was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas. At the time, she was given three years to live.
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To create the treatment, doctors first cut small pieces of tissue from Perkins’s tumours and studied the DNA to find mutations specific to her cancer. They focused on mutations that disrupted four genes which produced an array of abnormal proteins in the tumours.
Next, the doctors extracted immune cells known as tumour infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs, from the tumour biopsies. These are cells from the patient’s immune system that have invaded the tumour in a bid to kill it, but which failed in the task by being either too weak or too few in number.
After growing billions of these immune cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which ones would most effectively find and destroy the woman’s cancer cells by recognising their abnormal proteins.
The doctors treated Perkins by injecting 80 billion of the carefully-selected immune cells into her body. The therapy was given alongside pembrolizumab, a standard drug that can help the immune system to attack cancers. Tests after 42 weeks showed Perkins was completely cancer free. She has remained so ever since.
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While the US doctors who developed the therapy cannot be sure how much the infused immune cells contributed to her recovery, the use of pembrolizumab alone has not been very effective for advanced breast cancer in the past. The infused T cells were found in Perkins’s system for at least 17 months after her treatment began.
The success, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, is all the more remarkable because breast cancers, like prostate and ovarian cancer, have relatively few mutations, which makes them harder for the immune system to spot amid the body’s healthy tissues.
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But Melcher points out that the therapy is complex and expensive and more importantly, requires doctors to find enough infiltrating immune cells in a patient’s tumour to make the treatment effective. “The case with other TIL therapies in the past is that they’ve not been able to expand enough T cells in many patients, there aren’t enough to start with.”
Simon Vincent, director of research at Breast Cancer Now, added: “This is a remarkable and extremely promising result, but we need to see this effect repeated in other patients before giving hope of a new immunotherapy for incurable metastatic breast cancer.
Last edited by Isgrimnur on Mon Jun 04, 2018 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A genetically modified poliovirus may help some patients fight a deadly form of brain cancer, researchers report.
The experimental treatment seems to have extended survival in a small group of patients with glioblastoma who faced a grim prognosis because standard treatments had failed, Duke University researchers say.
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But the researchers and other brain-cancer doctors caution the research is at a very early stage. In the study, only 21 percent of patients experienced a prolonged survival. Much more follow-up research is needed to better assess and hopefully improve the treatment's effectiveness, the researchers say.
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The Duke researchers decided to try to use a genetically modified version of the poliovirus, which can cause a devastating form of paralysis, because of the virus's ability to infect nervous system cells.
The scientists removed one of the virus's genes to prevent it from causing polio and replaced that gene with one from a harmless virus known as a rhinovirus, which ordinarily causes the common cold.
The engineered virus was then infused directly into tumors in patients' brains with a tube inserted through a hole in the skull. The modified virus retains the ability to infect and kill brain tumor cells, and also appears to trigger the patient's own immune system cells to attack the tumors, the researchers say.
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There are substantial risks. The treatment can cause a dangerous swelling in the brain that can lead to seizures and other complications, the researchers found. One patient suffered a life-threatening blood clot in the brain that required surgery.
But overall, the median length of survival was 12.5 months for patients treated with poliovirus, compared with 11.3 months for a similar group of patients treated in the past, the researchers report. And starting at two years after treatment, the two groups' survival rate began to diverge, the researchers reported.
After 24 months, 21 percent of the patients treated with the virus had survived compared with 14 percent of the historical comparison group. After three years, 21 percent of the poliovirus treated patients survived, compared with 4 percent of the other group, according to the researchers.
Becky was well educated and healthy. She was also Canadian, which means she was able to access the opinions of different doctors and take on treatment without the financial strain that often crushes those without access to such services in the U.S. And even then, she was financially devastated after years of treatment and no work.
The energy she had to spend advocating and fighting for her own cause, when she was already so sick and on so many powerful drugs, juggling endless appointments and deciphering myriad treatment options, the effort she made trying to be heard, was more than anyone should be asked to take on. She learned to be her own best advocate, but the time it took to learn that came at the highest price: time.
Becky had many good doctors. She had incredible, caring nurses. These are people we cannot thank enough. But how often do I think of the ones who turned her away, who didn’t believe her? How crucial were those months of missed treatments, how much could be different now? I don’t know the answer. But I believe, in my heart, that it did not have to turn out the way it did.
Jim Allison, Ph.D., chair of Immunology and executive director of the immunotherapy platform at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, today was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for launching an effective new way to attack cancer by treating the immune system rather than the tumor. Allison is the first MD Anderson scientist to receive the world’s most preeminent award for outstanding discoveries in the fields of life sciences and medicine.
“By stimulating the ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells, this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy,” the Nobel Assembly of Karolinska Institute in Stockholm noted in announcing the award to Allison and Tasuku Honjo, M.D., Ph.D., of Kyoto University in Japan.
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Allison’s crucial insight was to block a protein on T cells that acts as a brake on their activation, freeing the T cells to attack cancer. He developed an antibody to block the checkpoint protein CTLA-4 and demonstrated the success of the approach in experimental models. His work led to development of the first immune checkpoint inhibitor drug. Ipilimumab was approved for late-stage melanoma by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011.
His drug, known commercially as Yervoy, became the first to extend the survival of patients with late-stage melanoma. Follow-up studies show 20 percent of those treated live for at least three years with many living for 10 years and beyond, unprecedented results. Subsequent research has extended this approach to new immune regulatory targets, most prominently PD-1 and PD-L1, with drugs approved to treat certain types and stages of melanoma, lung, kidney, bladder, gastric, liver, cervical, colorectal, and head and neck cancers and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Clinical trials are underway in many other cancer types.
"The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men's business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs." - Clarence Darrow
They showed that the human immune system—in particular, the T cell, a type of white blood cell that is central to what is known as “adaptive immunity”—could recognize and attack cancer. Which led to a question: Could T cells be trained to reject cancerous cells but not turn against the host? Could they be the basis of a new class of drug?
Im sure it will be so expensive no one can afford it.
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"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
Drug pricing is, of course, at the center of a familiar and inevitably acrimonious debate. The pharmaceutical industry defends high prices as a means to recoup the costs of drug discovery and development. Consumers, insurers, and governments argue that the prices charged for drugs are out of control, and bear no relationship to their real costs. But with cellular therapies the problem isn’t merely profiteering—it is that, unlike conventional drugs, cell therapies are inherently expensive to produce. The estimated cost to manufacture a typical CAR-T infusion is close to six figures. In short, even if CAR-T therapy were offered with no margin of profit, it would still rank with some of the most expensive procedures in medicine. Extracting cells from an individual patient, purifying them, genetically modifying them, and expanding their numbers into the millions will never be akin to churning out amoxicillin in a factory.
I read a few days ago that a lab is working on a "universal" immunotherapy, wherein an engineered virus infects a variety of cancer cells and makes them express myriad protein fragments that T cells recognize as enemies. If it pans out, it would remove the need to tailor each treatment to a particular patient with a particular cancer and reduce the cost considerably. They've had encouraging results in dogs and are beginning human trials.
Dogs are good analogs for some human cancers -- better than other lab animals, with the bonus that these treatments would work in pets, too. The article said that 50% of dogs who live to 10 will develop cancer, so there is no shortage of dog owners who are willing to enroll their pets in the studies.
Sorry, no link because I don't remember where I saw it.
I'm always skeptical of claim of a universal cancer cure as it essentially claims all cancers are created equal (or have sufficient commonality) for such a cure to attack only the bad and leave the good behind. Maybe this is so, I've just never read a compelling account to that effect. It seems to me if this is the case, then smoking could cause skin cancer, sunshine cause pancreatic cancer, and Twinkies cause cancer of the balls. After all, shouldn't that imply pathogens are also created equally?
I put scare quotes around "universal" because it's only that insofar as it doesn't have to be individually tuned. It works more like a vaccine -- it doesn't alter the patient's cells, but rather introduces particular antigens (proteins that get antibodies riled up) into cancer cells with a carrier virus so that the T cells can do their natural thing. The test version is effective against some 30 different kinds of tumors. In dogs. Some dogs. It's not remotely like a magic bullet, and it might fizzle in humans, but it's an encouraging approach.
Later on I'll see if I can find the story I read. I don't remember if it was online or in print.
Ah, here we go. Not the same story I read, but the same study. (And not 30 different cancers, but 30 different antigens. My memory gets lazy when it doesn't know it's going to be called upon.) The story that I half-remember was more concerned with human treatment implications.
A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.
But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.
Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.
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[T]he researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu.
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For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice. These model systems often respond to treatments that don't end up working in humans, so the results have to be treated with appropriate caution. Still, they can be a valuable way of understanding the biology of the immune response here.
The use of melanoma cells is informative, as these cells cannot be infected by the influenza virus. So this system also provides a test of whether the tumor cells themselves have to be infected in order to increase the immune response to them. Apparently they do not. Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn't limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn't infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well.
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Some vaccines contain chemicals that enhance the immune system's memory, promoting the formation of a long-term response to pathogens (called adjuvants). When a vaccine containing one of these chemicals was used, the immune system wasn't stimulated to limit the tumors' growth.
This suggests that it's less a matter of stimulating the immune system and more an issue of triggering it to attack immediately. But this is one of the things that will need to be sorted out with further study. The location of the stimulation will also need to be sorted out, too. Here, stimulation in one lung increases activity in both. But injection into muscles didn't work at all, and earlier work by some of the same team had indicated a heavy infection outside the lungs enhanced tumor growth by diverting immune cells elsewhere.
Dog's 11 cancerous tumours 'disappear' after experimental treatment
Once a dog was diagnosed with the cancer, the trial's researchers removed a small piece of the tumour and mixed it with a chemical to bolster the dog's immune response.
This was then injected back into the dog as a vaccine, each week for a number of weeks or months.
"With this one we make it specifically from the dog's own tumour," Dr Oksa said.
"So it's very, very personalised and then we hope that the dog's own immune system will recognise the cancer and start fighting it."
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"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
Shannen Doherty revealed Tuesday morning that she is fighting stage 4 cancer.
During an interview with Good Morning America, the 90210 alum confirmed that she has been quietly living with cancer again for the past year. The actress was first diagnosed with breast cancer back in 2015 and later revealed in 2016 that it had spread to her lymph nodes. Following a single mastectomy in 2016 and completing radiation and chemotherapy treatment in February 2017, Doherty announced she was in remission a couple of months later.
It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.
But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam; endoscopy; positron emission tomography, or PET scans; or MRI scans.
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On average, 1 in 5 patients have some sort of adverse reaction to drugs like the one the patients took, dostarlimab, known as checkpoint inhibitors. The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. It unmasks cancer cells, allowing the immune system to identify and destroy them.
Cancer is a weird thing. Some are hereditary some not. Sometimes children, even infants, get cancer. Others live to 100 cancer free. Smokers die a lot from cancer yet other smokers never get it. Weird disease.
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I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
That reminds me I saw a story where scientists can make rats old..Took same little ones and made some old. They are hoping to do the opposite soon and then move that to humans. Could use it to cure cancer and such too they hope.
Last edited by Daehawk on Tue Mar 07, 2023 12:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
As the clock inched toward 11:30 p.m., 65,838 people rose to their feet inside cavernous Veterans Stadium. It was Oct. 21, 1980, and Game 6 of the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals had reached the bottom of the ninth inning.
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Fans screamed and howled and cried, and Phillies players and coaches celebrated atop blades of artificial grass that had been pioneered by a Missouri chemical company called Monsanto.
The company marketed its turf to professional sports teams, high schools, and colleges as a cheaper, more durable alternative to natural grass.
Decades after the final out of the 1980 World Series was recorded, McGraw, Vukovich, Brett, and Quisenberry had all died from brain cancer.
They weren’t the only ones: In all, six former Phillies have reportedly been felled by glioblastoma — a particularly aggressive and deadly form of brain cancer — including former catcher Darren Daulton and former relief pitcher David West, who died in 2022.
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Tests run on two of the samples by Eurofins Lancaster Laboratories Environmental Testing found the turf contained 16 different types of PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances — so-called “forever chemicals,” which the EPA has said cause “adverse health effects that can devastate families.”
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame tested two other samples, and also found PFAS.
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In a statement, the Phillies said the organization shares “the frustration and sadness of losing six members of our baseball family to brain cancer.”
The team said it consulted several brain cancer experts who told the organization that there is no evidence of a link between artificial turf and the disease.
I worry about all my nonstick pans, especially the ones that have been noticeable scratched over time. If I weren't so lazy and cheap I would throw it all away and get cast iron skillets and regular old cooking pots and a crockpot that used liners. It may be paranoid fear induced by media trying to sell me stuff but the fear is real.
Chronic exposure to fine particulate air pollutants (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) may increase non-lung cancer risk in older adults, according to a study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a cohort study of millions of Medicare beneficiaries, the researchers found that exposures to PM2.5 and NO2 over a 10-year period increased the risk of developing colorectal and prostate cancers. The researchers also found that even low levels of air pollution exposure may make people particularly susceptible to developing these cancers, in addition to breast and endometrial cancers.
A team led by Lingyin Li, associate professor of biochemistry at Stanford and Arc Core Investigator, found that a protein called ENPP1 acts as an on/off switch that controls breast cancer’s ability to both resist immunotherapy and metastasize. The study, published on Dec. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that ENPP1 is produced by cancer cells and by healthy cells in and around the tumor, and that high patient ENPP1 levels are linked to immunotherapy resistance and subsequent metastases. The research could lead to new, more effective immunotherapies and help clinicians better predict patient response to existing medicines.
