Anna Almendrala - New Cancer Therapy Could Give Hope To 'Incurable' Patients
A new experimental treatment has achieved what chemotherapy
and bone marrow transplants have failed to do: put chronic, relapsing blood
cancers into remission.
What's more, it uses the body's own natural defense system
to attack these cancerous growths. The treatment involves T cells, a type of immune cell
that works as your body's own personal S.W.A.T. team to detect, surround, and
destroy foreign invaders like bacteria or viruses. Historically, cancerous
cells have grown too fast for T cells to mount an effective defense, and they
can also trick T cells into thinking that they’re a healthy part of the body as
opposed to a cancerous growth that needs to be stopped.
But in experimental treatments at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center in Seattle, initial evidence shows Dr. Stanley Riddell has
successfully trained these T cells to better recognize and eliminate cancer
cells in a short time span, allowing cancer to go into remission. Specifically, he extracted a person's T cells in order to prime
them to recognize the type of cancer that is affecting the patient, allowing
these primed T cells to attack the growth while sparing healthy cells and
tissue.
The results
Riddell's preliminary findings on the success of T cell
therapy to cure previously terminal cases of cancer made a stir
at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in Washington, D.C. on Sunday because of his eye-popping results: 93
percent of the small group of 29 participants with previously incurable or
constantly relapsing acute lymphoblastic leukemia have gone into complete
remission after undergoing Riddell’s immune cell therapy.
An additional 65 percent of 30 participants with
non-hodgkin's lymphoma have also gone into remission. And while it’s too early
to report the results of a small test group of 15 patients with chronic
lymphocytic leukemia, Riddell says that they’re also showing “really high"
remission rates. In total, Riddell has treated nearly 100 patients with the T
cell therapy.
"These were all cases that had failed all conventional
therapy, so they relapsed after chemotherapy. Many of them had relapsed after
an allogeneic bone marrow transplant or they just weren’t considered candidates
for a transplant,” he explained to HuffPost. "To take an experimental
therapy and use it in patients that are this advanced, and to get these kinds
of results, is really encouraging."
The T cell treatment is the result of a 10-year
collaboration with Dr. Michael Jensen of Seattle Children’s Hospital, who is
currently conducting trials in children with leukemia and getting similar
results, said Riddell. The effect appears to be long-lasting, and could provide
a way forward for developing therapies for the more common and harder to treat
diseases like breast, colon and lung cancer.
How it works
Riddell withdraws a patient’s immune cells in what amounts
to a simple blood donation. Then he takes a few weeks to link synthetic receptors
called chimeric antigen receptors to the T cells, in order to help them
identify cancer cells in the body and destroy them. Once they're re-infused
back into the patient, Riddell basically sits back and lets the T cells do
their thing. It generally took about 30 to 60 days for cancerous growths to
disappear in his patients, he said.
Riddell suspects that his T cell therapy worked so well
because the cancers he were treating were blood cancers. Instead of being bound
up in solid tumors, the cancer cells are diffuse throughout the body, and also
collect in certain sites where T cells also like to hang out: the bone marrow,
blood, lymph nodes and spleen.
What's next
Still, Riddell hopes that his research can be re-purposed to
begin attacking the more common cancers, like breast or colon cancer. These
types present a special difficulty because solid tumors essentially create
their own micro-environments that can turn off an active T cell, suppressing
its immune system function.
"We’re going to have to learn to combine T cell therapy
with things like check point inhibitors, which is another very effective form
of immunotherapy for some patients with solid tumors, or to engineer T cells in
ways that will allow them to function in that immunosuppressive microenvironment,"
Riddell said.
While his study is still in its earliest stages and has yet
to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, he hopes that the technology can
become available to the wider public within two to three years. "This is really another demonstration that [shows] the
immune system can be used to treat cancer,” Riddell concluded. "I wouldn’t
say yet that this will be applicable to all types of people with all cancers,
but I think that the opportunity is there and the research directions now are
really apparent."
