Clone Wars: Cancer Victim Injected With Billions of Reinforcement Immuno Cells Cloned From His Own Body; Free of Tumors Eight Weeks Later

Wow.

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used."

However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.

Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that simply growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.

Normally there are too few of the cells in a patient's body to effectively fight cancer.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said: "For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study."

The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.

Democrats immediately threw cold water on the so-called immune cell "surge strategy," noting that there was little progress on "political benchmarks" between healthy and cancerous cells. Barack Obama issued a terse statement expressing his "deep regret" that diplomacy with the metastatic melanomas had not "been given a chance to work."

posted by Ace at 01:43 PM

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