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Medicine: Immune cells from the woman’s own body used to wipe out tumours

Introversion

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This seems like a huge deal!

Doctors hail world first as woman’s advanced breast cancer is eradicated

The Guardian said:
A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours.

It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.

Judy Perkins, an engineer from Florida, was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas. At the time, she was given three years to live.

Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said Perkins’s response had been “remarkable”: the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that she has now been free of the disease for two years.

“My condition deteriorated a lot towards the end, and I had a tumour pressing on a nerve, which meant I spent my time trying not to move at all to avoid pain shooting down my arm. I had given up fighting,” Perkins said. “After the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike.”

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Lakey

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This sounds a lot like a treatment my sister-in-law is undergoing for multiple myeloma (a bone-marrow cancer). It's not generally practiced; she's in a study, as the patient in this article was. The technique, or variations on the theme, is being tried on a variety of cancers. It's incredibly sci-fi sounding and very cool.
 

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Sorry to hear your sister needs the treatment, and hope it works for her!

Yeah, it’s still very much an experimental (and expensive) thing. Hopefully it leads to a general, safe, and even affordable treatment for at least some kinds of cancers.