Skin Cancer Cure - Skin Cancer Patients Cured By Own Cloned Cells
A new skin cancer cure has emerged recently when skin cancer patients were cured by his own cloned cells.
This happened in the US when a group of doctors has for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system. The ground breaking skin cancer treatment for advanced melanoma, or skcin cancer, led to a long remission for the cancer suffering patient.
This was what happened - Dr Yee and his team from the Clinical Research Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from the 52-year old patient, whose melanoma was already well advanced and in stage four. The patient had been given less than a year to live.
The T-cells which specifically fight melanoma were modified and expanded in the lab and some five billion cells were then infused into the patient, who received no other kind of treatment. 2 months later, no tumoours were found during scans of his organs. And he has been cancer free for 2 years, according to Dr. Yee.
It was the first ever case to show that cloned cells from a patient's own immune system can successfully combat skin cancer. If further tests confirm the efficiency of the method, it could be used in some 25% of patients with late stage skin cancer, the study said.
Using a patient's own immune system to combat cancer, called immunotherapy, is a growing area of research that aims to develop less toxic cancer treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation. Because cancer occurs when the body's own cells grow out of control, the immune system responds weakly to the disease.
"The ability of the bodys own defences to tackle cancer in this case is all the more remarkable because the most deadly feature of the disease is its ability to colonise other parts of the body, when it becomes much harder to treat", London's Telegraph said.
Another piece of good news is that there were no harmful side effects to the therapy. What was more is that the pateitn's immune system had targeted not just one type of protein target on cancer cells, but 2 others as well. It is possible that treatment spurred the immune system to expand its cancer fighting ability in new ways.
However, the immune priming experiments has yet to yield a consistent therapy. Even the researchers who worked on the experiement involving 9 patients and just 1 success were quick to qualify the results. - "Its only 1 patient"
Some 160,000 cases of melanoma are diagonsed around the world every year. According to the World Health Organisation, some 48,000 people die from melanoma every year.
Tags: Skin Cancer, Melanoma
