No data has been published, but excitement over the initial, purported results of a new immune therapy cancer treatment have leaked out and doctors are hopeful. Using a designer drug method—modifying white blood cells and then reintroducing them to a cancer patients—has reported yielded “unprecedented” results.
A therapy that retrains the body's immune system to fight cancer has provoked excitement after more than 90% of terminally ill patients reportedly went into remission.
Doctors have cautioned that these are still baby steps and that the promising data presented has yet to be reviewed but hope is important and the field of designing a cancer patient’s immune system to fight off the disease itself is promising.
In one study, 94% of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish completely. Patients with other blood cancers had response rates greater than 80%, and more than half experienced complete remission.
Speaking at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”
The basic idea behind this treatment is training the T-cells of the patient to focus on specific cancer problems in that patient’s body.
The researchers genetically modified the t-cells to engineer a new targeting mechanism - with the technical name of chimeric antigen receptors - to target acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Prof Riddell told the BBC: "Essentially what this process does is, it genetically reprograms the T-cell to seek out and recognise and destroy the patient's tumor cells.
Before we jump for joy, there are still reviews to be conducted and data to be seen. The fact remains that while the initial results seem to be excellent, side effects in the field of T-cell therapies have been far worse than more traditional treatments like chemotherapy.
T-cell therapy is often considered an option of last resort because reprogramming the immune system can come with dangerous side-effects, including cytokine release syndrome (sCRS) – and overload defense cells. Twenty patients suffered symptoms of fever, hypotension and neurotoxicity due to sCRS, and two died, but the researchers noted that chemotherapy had failed in all the patients who participated in the new trials.
Riddell hesitated to say when the work would move beyond limited trials, but Bonini said: “I think we’re very close to some cellular product.”
At the very least, while not a cure-all, this is potentially proof that there is yet another method of treatment, and possibly a viable one for cancer patients considered untreatable before.