[p style="font-weight: bold;" class="arttitle"]Gene therapy 'cures' cancer in 2 men[/p][p class="posted"][Posted: Fri 01/09/2006]
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[/p]Two men appear to have been cured of a deadly form of skin cancer after being treated with a new method of gene therapy.
A team of researchers at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) have demonstrated 'sustained regression' of advanced melanoma - the most deadly type of skin cancer - in 17 patients, by genetically engineering the patients' own white blood cells to recognise and attack cancer cells.
Eighteen months after the treatment, two of the patients with the disease were cancer-free. Before the treatment, they were only expected to live for up to six months.
"These results represent the first time gene therapy has been used successfully to treat cancer. Moreover, we hope it will be applicable not only to melanoma, but also for a broad range of common cancers, such as breast and lung cancer", said Dr Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the US National Institutes of Health.
The body's white blood cells, autologous lymphocytes, have previously been used to treat some types of skin cancer. During the process, they are first removed from a person with advanced melanoma. Then the most aggressive tumour-killing cells are isolated, multiplied in the laboratory and reintroduced to patients who have been depleted of all remaining white blood cells.
While reasonably successful, this method can only be used on certain melanoma patients.
The NCI researchers set out to discover an affective way to convert normal white blood cells in the laboratory, into cancer-fighting cells. These newly engineered cells were then given to the 17 patients, where they began to attack the tumour cells.
With 15 of the patients, the melanoma remained, but for two, the cancer tumours disappeared or shrank enough so that they could be surgically removed.
The researchers acknowledged that the technique must be improved, but added that they hoped it could be used to treat many types of common cancer 'in the near future'.
Details of these findings are published in the journal, Science.
