Extraordinary 94% response rate for new immunotherapy protocol!

dlb823

WoW! http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/02/16/scientist...

It's always great to hear about important research findings that might actually benefit us sooner than later!!!

MusicLover

Deanna, Thank you for posting this.

cp418

This reminds me of a similar news release maybe last year where they used immunotherapy for childhood leukemia. (I just can't recall details but think it was done on the east coast???) Lots of research going on and hope it becomes accessible to patients ASAP. It should to be on the fast track for approval over traditional toxic drugs IMO.

http://www.cancerresearch.org/our-strategy-impact/...

Fallleaves

Wow, impressive!

JohnSmith

Immunotherapy drugs are humanity's best shot at beating cancer. They have yielded impressive, durable responses in a variety of cancer types for which conventional therapies historically have had limited success.

This latest news refers to the success of using CAR-T cell therapy, or simply CAR-T, a form of Immunotherapy.
CAR-T stories have been surfacing during the last two years, but the success of these therapies are only occurring in hematological malignancies (blood cancers).
At the AAAS conference this past weekend, multiple abstracts were presented by Dr. Stan Riddell (Fred Hutch in Seattle, WA) discussing engineering T-Cells for Immunotherapy. They reported on early stage trials for patients with different types of blood cancer - including acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, chronic lymphocyte leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Most of the media reports (including the original link above) focused on the patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, where 9 out of 10 entered remission following the immune cell therapy. This is where the 94% stat comes from. The researchers also reported seeing similarly impressive responses in around half of patients with the other blood cancers too. Apparently there were no scientific papers released, so this data still needs to be scrutinized and published, according to Cancer Research UK, here.

In solid tumors (like breast cancer), this therapy isn't working, yet.
The single biggest problem for CAR-T in solid tumors is selectivity against normal cells. In blood cancers like ALL, this is less of a worry - a person can live with subsets of his/her blood cells wiped out along with the cancerous versions of those cells. The same is not true for most solid tumors. T-cell therapies for solid tumors are being tested for some targets with the highest selectivity but that is the single biggest stumbling block.
Long term, using tumor specific neo-epitopes (fully personalized immunotherapy) is one possible conceptual path forward past this bottleneck...

LisaAlissa

Impressive, but when comparing the tested treatment to current toxic treatments, don't forget the penultimate paragraph in the article:

"Such reprogramming of the immune system is often considered a last-ditch option due to its dangerous side effects. The researchers noted that seven of the ALL patients required intensive care after suffering an immune reaction called cytokine release syndrome (sCRS). Two of those patients died."

That's quite a side-effect profile...and the news story doesn't say how many patients were treated.

LisaAlissa

TectonicShift

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