T cell
BỆNH UNG THƯ CÓ THỂ CHỮA ĐƯỢC THEO PHƯƠNG PHÁP MỚI. (NGUỒN TIN CNN)
Đại học University of Pennsylvania đã nghiên cứu và thành công cho
nhiều ca ung thư của trẻ em và người lớn. T-cells (vai trò quan trọng trong hệ miễn
dịch) của bệnh nhân sẽ được lấy ra khỏi người bệnh; sau đó sẽ được chỉnh sửa,
thêm vào một số Gen và cấy trở lại bệnh nhân. Một T-cell mới sẽ nhân lên 10
ngàn T-cell. Những T-cell này sẽ tìm và tiêu diệt các tế bào ung thư. Hiện tại
đã có 59 ca thử nghiệm và 25 ca thành công, không còn chiệu trứng ung thư trong
gần 2 năm.
Ung thư tưởng chừng không thể chữa được nhưng
điều đó sẽ làm được bằng phương pháp quá thông minh. Bằng cách dùng chính hệ
miễn dịch của mình để tiêu diệt tế bào ung thư. T-cell là tế bào quan trọng
trong hệ miễn dịch, người bệnh sẽ được lấy ra "nhiều tế bào T-cell"
và chỉnh sửa, thêm vào các Gen. Phương pháp mới này sẽ nhân MỘT tế bào lên 10
NGÀN tế bào. Với "đội quân hùng hậu" tế bào T-cell, chúng sẽ tìm và
tiêu diệt tế bào ung thư.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/cohen-cancer-study/#
Killing
cancer like the common cold
By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical
Correspondent
STORY
HIGHLIGHTS
·
Nick Wilkins was out
of options for battling leukemia
·
He is now cancer free
after an experimental treatment
·
Doctors taught Nick's
immune cells to become adept at killing cancer
·
Experts hope the
treatment will quickly become more widely available
(CNN) --
Nick Wilkins was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 4 years old, and when the
cancer kept bouncing back, impervious to all the different treatments the
doctors tried, his father sat him down for a talk.
John Wilkins explained to Nick, who
was by then 14, that doctors had tried chemotherapy, radiation, even a bone
marrow transplant from his sister.
"I explained to him that we're
running out of options," Wilkins remembers telling his son.
He asked his son if he understood
what it would mean if this treatment didn't work.
"He understood he could
die," Wilkins says. "He was very stoic."
A few months later, Nick traveled
from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia to become a part of the experiment.
This new therapy was decidedly
different from the treatments he'd received before: Instead of attacking his
cancer with poisons like chemotherapy and radiation, the Philadelphia doctors
taught Nick's own immune cells to become more adept at killing the cancer.
Two months later, he emerged
cancer-free. It's been six months since Nick, now 15, received the personalized
cell therapy, and doctors still can find no trace of leukemia in his system.
Twenty-one other young people
received the same treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and 18
of them, like Nick, went into complete remission -- one of them has been
disease-free for 20 months. The Penn doctors released their findings this
weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.
"It gives us hope that this is
a cure," Nick's father says. "They're really close. I think they're
really onto something."
'A whole new realm of
medicine '
At the conference, two other cancer
centers -- Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and the National Cancer
Institute -- will be announcing results with immunotherapies like the one Nick
received. The results are promising, especially considering that the patients
had no success with practically every other therapy.
"This is absolutely one of the
more exciting advances I've seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years,"
said Dr. David Porter, a hematologist and oncologist at Penn. "We've
entered into a whole new realm of medicine."
In the therapy, doctors first remove
the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They
then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into
the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These
"hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's
body.
Essentially, researchers are trying
to train Nick's body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight
off the common cold.
In addition to the pediatric
patients, Penn scientists tried the therapy out in 37 adults with leukemia, and
12 went into complete remission. Eight more patients went into partial
remission and saw some improvements in their disease.
The treatment does make patients
have flulike symptoms for a short period of time -- Nick got so sick he ended
up in the intensive care unit for a day -- but patients are spared some of the
more severe and long-lasting side effects of extensive chemotherapy.
Penn will now work with other
medical centers to test the therapy in more patients, and they plan to try the
therapy out in other types of blood cancers and later in solid tumors.
A university press release says it
has a licensing relationship with the pharmaceutical company Novartis and
"received significant financial benefit" from the trial, and Porter
and other inventors of the technology "have benefited financially and/or
may benefit financially in the future."
Searching for one-in-a-million
cancer cells
The big question is whether Nick's
leukemia will come back.
Doctors are cautiously optimistic.
The studies have only been going on since 2010, but so far relapse rates have
been relatively low: of the 18 other pediatric patients who went into complete
remission, only five have relapsed and of the 12 adults who went into complete
remission, only one relapsed. Some of the adult patients have been cancer-free
and without a relapse for more than three years and counting.
Relapses after this personalized
cell therapy may be more promising than relapses after chemotherapy or a bone
marrow transplant, Porter explained.
First, doctors have been delighted
to find the reengineered T-cells -- the ones that know how to hunt down and
attack cancer -- are still alive in the patients' bodies after more than three
years.
"The genetically modified
T-cells have survived," Porter said. "They're still present and
functional and have the ability to protect against recurrence."
Second, before declaring patients in
remission, Penn doctors scoured especially hard for errant leukemia cells.
Traditionally, for the kind of
leukemia Nick has, doctors can find one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 cancer cells.
But Penn's technology could find one in 100,000 to one in a million cancer
cells, and didn't find any in Nick or any of the patients who went into
complete remission.
'It's not a fluke'
One of the best aspects of this new
treatment is that it won't be terribly difficult to reproduce at other medical
centers, Porter said, and one day, instead of being used only experimentally,
it could be available to anyone who needed it.
"Our hope is that this can
progress really quite quickly," he said. "It won't be available to
everyone next year, but I don't think it would take a decade, either."
Right now patients can only get this
therapy if they're in a study, but Dr. Renier Brentjens, director for cellular
therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, says he thinks it could become
available to all patients in just three to five years.
"When you have three centers
all with a substantial number of patients seeing the same thing -- that these
cells work in this disease - you know it's not a fluke," he said.
Two days ago, Brentjens became the
co-founder of Juno Therapeutics, a for-profit biotech start-up company that's
working on immunotherapies.
"Fifteen years ago I was in the
lab looking at these cells kill tumor cells in a petri dish and then I saw them
kill tumor cells in mice, and then finally in humans," Brentjens said.
He says he'll never forget the first
patient he treated, who initially had an enormous amount of cancer cells in his
bone marrow. Then after the therapy, Brentjens looked under the microscope and,
in awe, realized he couldn't find a single cancer cell.
"I can't describe what that's like,"
he said. "It's fantastic."
CNN's John Bonifield
contributed to this report.
