Cloned immune cells cleared patient's cancer

Ian Sample, science correspondent

A patient whose skin cancer had spread throughout his body has been given the all-clear after being injected with billions of his own immune cells.

Tests revealed that the 52-year-old man's tumours, which spread from his skin to his lung and groin, vanished within two months of having the treatment, and had not returned two years later.

Doctors attempted the experimental therapy as part of a clinical trial after the man's cancer failed to respond to conventional treatments.

The man is the first to benefit from the new technique, which uses cloning to produce billions of copies of a patient's immune cells. When they are injected into the body they attack the cancer and force it into remission.

Campaigners and scientists in the UK yesterday welcomed the breakthrough. "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," said Ed Yong at Cancer Research UK.

Peter Johnson, chief clinician at the charity, added: "Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone's own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging."

Cassian Yee at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle extracted immune cells from the patient and found that a small proportion of them, called CD4 T cells, naturally attacked a protein found on nearly three-quarters of the cancer cells. Using cloning techniques, Yee's team replicated these cells until they had more than 5bn of them.

When the cells were injected into the patient they immediately began attacking the cancer. Intriguingly, the patient's immune system gradually began a wider offensive, attacking all the cancer cells in the body, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two months later medical scans failed to pick up any signs of cancer in the patient.

The team believes the treatment could be effective in around a quarter of skin cancer patients whose immune systems have cells that are already primed to attack their tumours. "For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study," Yee added.

In an accompanying article Louis Weiner, director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre at Georgetown University, Washington, wrote that Yee's work "underscores the remarkable potential of the immune system to eradicate cancer, even when the disease is widespread".

The case showed that hopes to turn the immune system into a weapon against cancer was becoming a reality, Weiner added. "If the destination is not yet at hand, it is in sight. The endgame has begun."

Using the immune system to fight cancer could be much safer than existing treatments, which often have serious side effects.

The Guardian

Watch what you touch: A bad germ gets worse

Something is wrong. Bush is wanting billions more to kill a bunch of Iraqi citizens and we are aproaching a germ that has the potential to kill millions of US citizens.
WTF

Tom


‘C. diff’ rivals MRSA as the next deadly bacteria threat, experts say

C. diff has long been a common, usually benign bug associated with simple, easily treated diarrhea in older patients in hospitals and nursing homes. About 3 percent of healthy adults harbor the bacteria with no problem. But overuse of antibiotics has allowed the germ to develop resistance in recent years, doctors said, creating the toxic new type that stumps traditional treatment.

"This is the one we're scared of," said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection control at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

C. diff produces anaerobic spores transmitted through feces that are able to survive for months on most surfaces. People are infected when they ingest the bacteria, typically by touching contaminated surfaces and then touching their mouths, or by eating contaminated food.

Overall infections caused by C. diff more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to the latest government figures. In 2005, the year of Warren’s illness, 301,200 cases of C. difficile-associated disease (CDAD) were logged in discharge records kept by the nation’s hospitals. Some 28,600 people who had the infection died.

That's only hospitals, however. Counting nursing homes and other care centers, the number of cases nationally is likely closer to 500,000, experts estimate.

Contaminated health care settings remain the main source of C. diff infections, primarily because they treat so many people with serious diarrheal illness. The NAP1 strain has been found in other sites and populations in recent years, infecting young adults and pregnant women with no history of antibiotic use, according to federal sources.

Despite the concern, scientists don't know how many people contract NAP1 infections, or how many die from them. C. diff infection is not a reportable condition in most states, although a rare pilot project that mandated reporting in Ohio in 2006 found more than 14,000 cases in hospitals and nursing homes that year, according to the state health department.