A promising new leukemia treatment that uses the patient's immune system to fight diseased cells has been gaining traction, doctors at the memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City announced this week.
The medical officials, who have been conducting a study in conjunction with University of Pennsylvania researchers, say they're working on a way to target a certain kind of leukemia that invades B cells in the immune system.
This particular type of cancer is called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, according to Science Translational Medicine.
This kind of leukemia, which doesn't respond to routine administration of chemotherapy, almost always causes a relapse in cancer patients months after they've stopped receiving treatment. A study in Science Translational Medicine revealed only a slight number of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia respond positively to chemotherapy.
Until this point, doctors have been treating the leukemia with bone marrow transplants. But some patients can't undergo such a procedure if their cancer is active, for the diseased cells must be in remission for the transplant to go through successfully.
But now, medical officials are trying a different tactic - using the patient's immune system, doctors attack cancerous tissues directly.
Doctors have been employing a certain method for this approach: first, the patient's blood is drawn and analyzed - certain suppressor T cells are then isolated and genetically altered to pick up a specific proteins that live in cancerous cells.
The study, which involved 16 participants, showed promising results - 14 of the test subjects came to full remission after they were given a dosage of the new T cells.
Despite its initial success, doctors are wary to cosign the treatment right away. Physicians told Translational Medicine that further tests will follow, especially those geared toward examining the side effects of this new method.
