A woman with an aggressive form of breast cancer which defied chemotherapy and spread to other organs, was cured with an experimental treatment that triggered her immune system, researchers said Monday.
The woman has been cancer-free for two years, reported the US-based team, presenting their results as “a new immunotherapy approach” for the treatment of patients with a late-stage form of the disease.
Other experts not involved in the work hailed it as “exciting”.
So-called “immunotherapy” has already been shown to work in some people with cancer of the lung, cervix, blood cells (leukaemia), skin (melanoma) and bladder.
But an immune breakthrough for bowel, breast and ovary cancer has remained elusive.
In the latest study, a team extracted immune cells called lymphocytes from the patient, tweaked them in the lab, then reinjected them.
The woman was 49 when she signed up for the clinical trial after several attempts at a cure through conventional treatments had failed, said the study published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.
The cancer had spread to various parts of her body, including the liver.
A person’s immune system is designed to kill invaders, including rogue, cancerous cells. But it can fail, often because it cannot recognise cancer cells containing the patient’s own DNA.
Immunotherapy trains a patient’s own immune cells to recognise and fight cancer.
For the new study, researchers took lymphocytes from a tumour in the woman’s body and scanned them for specific types which reacted to mutant, cancerous cells.
