NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia — turning the patients' own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.
They've only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.
"It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did," said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "We're just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last."
While maintaining an appropriate sense of caution, this may be the beginning of a whole new level of medicine. Manipulating the immune system into recognizing its blind spots has a potential that is limitless. The fact that the T-cells are tricked into behaving differently makes me wonder if this breakthrough will eventually affect AIDS therapy and lupus treatments. I will definitely update as more is published.
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