We could be closer to a cure for cancer than ever before after cancer doctors and researchers uncovered something that’s being described as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the race to cure the deadly disease. ‘T Cells’ are now thought to be the key. They’re immune cells that the body already has and it’s thought that they can be programmed to attack and kill off metastatic tumors and blood cancers.
“In the laboratory and in clinical trials, we are seeing dramatic responses in patients with tumours that are resistant to conventional high-dose chemotherapy,” says Dr. Stanley Riddell from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle. “These are in patients who have failed everything. Most of the patients in our trial would be projected to have two to five months to live. This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest – to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”
T-cell therapy appears to works best on the liquid tumors of the blood and bone marrow currently, but the breakthrough could prove useful in cures for all types of cancer.
Dr Riddell continues: “We have a long way to go. The response is not always durable. Some of these patients do relapse, we are cognisant of that. But the early data is unprecedented. This is potentially paradigm-shifting in terms of how we treat them. I think this is a significant breakthrough, but we have a way to go. We have to understand how we bring it forward earlier into the treatment course of these diseases. We don’t want to wait until patients have failed everything else.”
Here’s more of the development, which might just prove to be entirely revolutionary…
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