‘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.

Surprisingly Simple Cure for Multiple Sclerosis By an Italian Doctor

Left: diagram from a medical text showing how MS affects the myelin sheathing of nerves. Right: MS lesions under a microscope.

An Italian doctor has been getting dramatic results with a new type of treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, which affects up to 2.5 million people worldwide. In an initial study, Dr. Paolo Zamboni took 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, performed a simple operation to unblock restricted bloodflow out of the brain - and two years after the surgery, 73% of the patients had no symptoms. Dr. Zamboni's thinking could turn the current understanding of MS on its head, and offer many sufferers a complete cure.


Multiple sclerosis, or MS, has long been regarded as a life sentence of debilitating nerve degeneration. More common in females, the disease affects an estimated 2.5 million people around the world, causing physical and mental disabilities that can gradually destroy a patient's quality of life.

It's generally accepted that there's no cure for MS, only treatments that mitigate the symptoms - but a new way of looking at the disease has opened the door to a simple treatment that is causing radical improvements in a small sample of sufferers.

Italian Dr. Paolo Zamboni has put forward the idea that many types of MS are actually caused by a blockage of the pathways that remove excess iron from the brain - and by simply clearing out a couple of major veins to reopen the blood flow, the root cause of the disease can be eliminated.

Dr. Zamboni's revelations came as part of a very personal mission - to cure his wife as she began a downward spiral after diagnosis. Reading everything he could on the subject, Dr. Zamboni found a number of century-old sources citing excess iron as a possible cause of MS. It happened to dovetail with some research he had been doing previously on how a buildup of iron can damage blood vessels in the legs - could it be that a buildup of iron was somehow damaging blood vessels in the brain?

He immediately took to the ultrasound machine to see if the idea had any merit - and made a staggering discovery. More than 90% of people with MS have some sort of malformation or blockage in the veins that drain blood from the brain. Including, as it turned out, his wife.

He formed a hypothesis on how this could lead to MS: iron builds up in the brain, blocking and damaging these crucial blood vessels. As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself, and immune cells from the bloodstream, to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves - Multiple Sclerosis develops.

He named the problem Chronic Cerebro-Spinal Venous Insufficiency, or CCSVI.

Zamboni immediately scheduled his wife for a simple operation to unblock the veins - a catheter was threaded up through blood vessels in the groin area, all the way up to the effected area, and then a small balloon was inflated to clear out the blockage. It's a standard and relatively risk-free operation - and the results were immediate. In the three years since the surgery, Dr. Zamboni's wife has not had an attack.

Widening out his study, Dr. Zamboni then tried the same operation on a group of 65 MS-sufferers, identifying blood drainage blockages in the brain and unblocking them - and more than 73% of the patients are completely free of the symptoms of MS, two years after the operation.

In some cases, a balloon is not enough to fully open the vein channel, which collapses either as soon as the balloon is removed, or sometime later. In these cases, a metal stent can easily be used, which remains in place holding the vein open permanently.

Dr. Zamboni's lucky find is yet to be accepted by the medical community, which is traditionally slow to accept revolutionary ideas. Still, most agree that while further study needs to be undertaken before this is looked upon as a cure for MS, the results thus far have been very positive.

Naturally, support groups for MS sufferers are buzzing with the news that a simple operation could free patients from what they have always been told would be a lifelong affliction, and further studies are being undertaken by researchers around the world hoping to confirm the link between CCSVI and MS, and open the door for the treatment to become available for sufferers worldwide.

It's certainly a very exciting find for MS sufferers, as it represents a possible complete cure, as opposed to an ongoing treatment of symptoms. We wish Dr. Zamboni and the various teams looking further into this issue the best of luck.

Source: Gizmag Via The Globe and Mail.

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