Research behind a new treatment for leukemia has just been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and may signal one of the most significant advances in the battle against cancer in decades. Though doctors at the University of Pennsylvania have only treated three leukemia patients, they have reported that the new treatment was able to make the most common type of leukemia virtually disappear in two of them and reduce it by 70 percent in the third.
According to the experts, the treatment is a gene therapy that renders a person’s own blood cells into “assassins” that seek out and destroy cancer cells. In each patient, as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away within a few weeks, and a year later remained gone. Professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and an author of the study, Dr. Carl June, commented that the gene therapy exceeded their expectations and that they were surprised it worked so well.
Scientists have been trying for years to develop new ways to boost the immune system’s ability to fight off cancer and earlier attempts at genetically modifying T-cells, a form of white blood cells, proved unsuccessful seeing as the modified cells were unable to reproduce and quickly vanished.
Dr. June and his team were able to utilize a new technique to deliver new genes into the T-cells, effectively reprogramming them to multiply and serve the main function of targeting cancer cells just as they would viruses.
The study, which details the experience of one 64 year-old patient, described how he noticed no change for two weeks, but altered suddenly when he then became ill with fever, nausea, and chills, which signified that the gene therapy was working. Characterized as the worst flu of his life, when it was over, he was significantly better.
At the moment though, the main complication is that the therapy also seems to destroy some other infection-fighting blood cells, which requires additional monthly treatments for the patients. Even so, the scientists are now looking to apply their new gene therapy technique to additional leukemia-related cancers as well as a range of others including pancreatic, ovarian, prostate, and brain cancer.
The study is being hailed as a significant breakthrough and an amazing achievement, and though the new research has only involved three patients, many are extremely optimistic and hopeful about further findings.

Source: http://tv.ibtimes.com/new-leukemia-therapy-may-be-the-greatest-breakthrough-in-decades/1596.html

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