A new cancer treatment that may cure or extend life by 1 or 2 years for half of the treated patients has been approved for clinical trials by the FDA, beginning with 22 patients.

Dr Zheng Cui, of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, has shown in laboratory experiments that immune cells from some people can be almost 50 times more effective in fighting cancer than in others.

Dr. Cui plans to transplant these "super immune cells" from healthy patients to cancer patients.