Scientists report success using T-cell cancer therapy

Scientists in the United States this week announced extraordinary results in early trials of a new cancer treatment. The T-cell therapy has raised the prospect of a lasting cure for cancer, with 94 percent of the terminally ill leukemia patients in one study seeing their symptoms vanish.

The gene-editing cell treatment is designed to work by reprogramming a patient's own T-cells with synthetic molecules that allow them to target specific cancer cells.

Dr. Stanley Riddell, an immunotherapy researcher and oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, announced his finding to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And while labs all over the world are working on T-cell therapies, Riddell said his research is slightly different.

"So one of the things that we're doing that's a little bit different than the other groups, we're engineering particular types of T-cells that we know have the capacity for longevity, so they are the cells that provide us the immunologic memory, and so they do, theoretically, have the potential to live in the body for life. That could provide, first of all it provides an immune response against the tumor that lasts long enough to hopefully eradicate all the tumor cells, but secondly, it would give you a persisting immune response that could recognize a cancer, should a cancer start to grow again."

According to a statement by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, some of the patients in Riddell's trial only had months to live, after having relapsed from, or were resistant to, other treatments. According to his findings, those patients show no signs of the disease.

"I think it's very exciting times. I think immunotherapy is becoming a new modality that is going to, not completely replace chemotherapy or surgery or radiation, but certainly will find a place in many circumstances to benefit patients."

Riddell's adoptive T-cell therapy is still in its testing phases, and is currently only being tested to treat a few specific kinds of cancer. He said he hopes their research will eventually broaden to include immunotherapy treatment for many other forms of cancer, like breast and lung. — Reuters