A woman with advanced breast cancer has made a dramatic recovery after receiving a personalised therapy using her own immune cells. It’s the first time this type of therapy has worked in breast cancer, suggesting that it may be able to help many more people with common types of cancer, even after they’ve spread to other parts of the body. The woman had breast cancer that had spread to other organs, despite trying seven other cancer treatments. “She had tennis ball-sized lesions throughout her liver, says Steven Rosenberg at the National Institutes of Health, Maryland. “It probably would have killed her in the next two to three months.” But Rosenberg and colleagues tried a new method for boosting the immune system to treat her cancer, and six weeks later, the woman’s tumours had halved in size. A year later, they had disappeared. Two and a half years on from treatment, the woman remains healthy. The treatment works by targeting genetic mutations that are acquired by cancer cells as they grow and multiply. These mutations are different in each patient, and some cause changes in the proteins that sit on the surface of cells. These surface proteins can be recognised by the immune system, prompting it to attack the cancer cells, but this immune reaction is usually not powerful enough to fight the cancer on its own. Powering-up this immune response is a major goal for new cancer treatments. One approach is to take lymphocytes – a type of immune cell – from a patient, grow them in the lab to obtain huge numbers of them, and put them back into the patient. So far, immunotherapies that use this or other approaches have had some success against cancers with a lot of mutations – such as skin cancer, and lung cancers linked to smoking. But until now, such treatments haven’t worked in cancers with fewer mutations, such as breast cancer.
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2170679-woman-survives-metastatic-breast-cancer-thanks-to-new-treatment/
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