‘Breakthrough’ Immunotherapy Method Cures Advanced Cancer

Killer T-Cell

A breakthrough therapy to modify T-cells into potent tumor-killing agents wiped out leukemia in three patients and allowed two of them to stay cancer-free for a year, US researchers said Wednesday.

The findings are the first to show how gene transfer therapy can create specialized T-cells, which guard the body from infection, that attack cancerous tumors in advanced cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

The technique helped three elderly male patients who otherwise had little hope of survival, said the research published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine.

Further studies are needed, but the advances offer hope to people who suffer from other cancer types such as ovarian, lung, myeloma and melanoma.

"Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

"It worked much better than we thought it would."

Scientists removed a sample of the patients' T-cells and genetically modified them to attack all cells that express a certain kind of protein, CD19, which includes tumor cells.

They also engineered the T-cells to start triggering other T-cells to multiply as soon as they attached to a cancer cell, bringing on a faster death for the tumor but avoiding the side-effects of cancer drugs.

"We saw at least a 1,000-fold increase in the number of modified T-cells in each of the patients. Drugs don't do that," said June, describing the infused T-cells as "serial killers."

"On average, each infused T-cell led to the killing of thousands of tumor cells -- and overall, destroyed at least two pounds of tumor in each patient."

One patient's case, described in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a 64-year-old man whose blood and marrow were "replete with tumor cells."

He saw little change for the first two weeks after treatment, but then started experiencing nausea, chills and fever. Test showed he was undergoing a huge rise in T-cell count. By day 28, his blood showed no evidence of leukemia.

A 65-year-old patient saw similar results, with no trace of tumor after a year, but the 77-year-old patient saw a slight recurrence of cancer after he was treated with steroids. However his tumor load remains far from what it was before the treatment.

"Most of what I do is treat patients with no other options, with a very, very risky therapy with the intent to cure them," said co-principal investigator David Porter.

"This approach has the potential to do the same thing, but in a safer manner."

Bone marrow transplants are typically the only treatment for leukemia patients, but they carry a minimum 20 percent risk of dying from the procedure and cure rates hover at around 50 percent.

It remains unknown how long the treatment may keep cancer at bay.

"The doctors have found evidence that months after infusion, the new cells had multiplied and were capable of continuing their seek-and-destroy mission against cancerous cells throughout the patients' bodies," said the study.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the second most common type of adult leukemia after acute myeloid leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers intend to study similar approaches in children whose leukemia has resisted standard treatment.

They are also looking to see if the approach could target non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and acute lymphocytic leukemia, mesothelioma cancer cells, ovarian and pancreatic cancer cells.

Skin cancer risk assessment made as easy as an iPhone app !

Despite years of health promotion campaigns advising us about the dangers of skin cancer, the incidence of the most dangerous type - melanoma - has been steadily rising since the 1970s with around 130,000 cases now diagnosed globally each year according to the World Health Organization. Even if we no longer spend hours sunning ourselves on the beach, extended time outdoors playing sport or socializing can still put us at risk of this deadly cancer. Developed by molecular diagnostics company Health Discovery Corporation (HDC), MelApp is an iPhone app designed help detect melanoma at an early - and likely curable - stage using mathematical algorithms and image based pattern recognition technology.

To use the app, you take a photo of an unusual mole or freckle with your iPhone's camera using the zoom feature to ensure it fills the green box on the screen. The photo is then uploaded and evaluated against a database licensed from Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.

If the risk is significant MelApp recommends you seek medical advice and can refer you to a nearby specialist for proper follow up.

It can also store images in albums so you can track changes in your freckles and moles over time. Sliding indicators are used to note information such as size, color and how fast it has developed.

MelApp is available from the iTunes store and costs $1.99 - which seems like a small investment in your health. An Android version is on the way.

Source: Gizmag

Weaponized Salmonella Could Be Used to Fight Cancer in the Gut

Salmonella Wikimedia Commons

A potential new cancer treatment could be as simple as taking a swig of some genetically modified salmonella. The bug, famous for forcing food recalls and making people sick, could be weaponized to fight tumor cells.

It could be useful in the fight against cancers in the gut area, like the liver, spleen and colon. That’s where salmonella infects people anyway, so arming it with some cancer-killing weapons could make it easier to attack cancer cells in those spots.

Researchers at U of M’s Masonic Cancer Center modified some salmonella to make it less potent, and they added a hormone that is used to fight cancer, called Interleukin 2. The hormone identifies tumor cells as a threat and triggers an immune response, and it’s used to treat skin melanomas and kidney cancer, according to theAmerican Cancer Society.

Yale Univeristy scientists reported last month that salmonella is able to arrange proteins in a specific pattern, which allows it to inject itself into cells and take them over. Salmonella doped with IL-2 would exploit this ability, enabling the delivery of the cancer-fighting hormone into the affected areas.

The bacteria also likes to grow inside tumor cells, as scientists have known for some time. Bacterial tumor reduction is actually a pretty old idea, according to a U of M news release — in a published report from 1860s Austria, a patient with a large tumor was placed in the same room as someone with a bad infection, and the infection eventually spread to the tumor, shrinking it. The infection also killed the cancer patient, however.

Although the bacteria is “weaponized” in this study, the salmonella itself is weakened, so a person wouldn’t get sick.

Patients would just have to drink a few ounces of salmonella-filled water and the bacteria would make its way through the body.

It might not replace traditional treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, but it wouldn’t have their nasty side effects. At the very least, it could be one more weapon in the arsenal against cancers in the gut.

Source: Popsci via University of Minnesota

Black Lab Dog Sniffs Out Bowel Cancer in Patients with Near-Perfect Accuracy

The dog, an eight-year-old blackLabrador called Marine sniffed out early-stage bowel cancer from breath and stool samples, as reported in the journal, 'Gut'. 

Remember when the Pentagon spent $19 billion to find the best possible bomb detector only to find out it was a dog? The same could be true for cancer diagnosis. After pouring countless dollars into high-tech diagnostic tools, dogs have exhibited a unique talent for accurately sniffing out biomarkers for a variety of cancers (bladder, lung, and breast cancers among them), and Japanese researchers are now reporting that their black labrador has added bowel cancer to that list.

This is Not the Cancer-Sniffing Black Lab

According to findings published in the aptly-named journal Gut, an eight-year-old female lab carried out 74 sniff tests over the course of several months, with each test comprised of five breath or stool samples. One of each five was from a cancerous subject, while the rest were from subjects who were cancer free or who had had cancer previously. The researchers even tried to fool the dog by including samples from subjects with non-cancerous bowel or gut conditions.

But the numbers—and the nose, it would seem—don’t lie; the dog nailed the breath tests with 95 percent accuracy and the stool sniffs with a stunning 98 percent accuracy, making her just as effective as the best high-tech tools clinicians use today, including invasive colonoscopies. Moreover, she excelled particularly in diagnosing samples from subjects with early stage cancers.

That’s huge considering early detection is quite literally the difference between life and death for most cancer patients—a surgery can cure 90 percent of early stage bowel cancers, but recovery rates drop precipitously as the disease advances.

Of course, training cancer-sniffing dogs is costly, difficult, and inconsistent from dog to dog. But these findings offer hope that an electronic nose capable of accurately diagnosing bowel cancers early is within technological reach. As for the dog, well, we’re assuming her .980 sniffing average earned her a treat.
Source: Popsci via ABC Science