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Flaxbee

(13,661 posts)
Mon Apr 1, 2013, 01:25 PM Apr 2013

Gene therapy cures leukaemia in eight days

Just saw this today; it's too "old" for LBN but excellent news nonetheless. Apologies if it's a duplicate:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729104.100-gene-therapy-cures-leukaemia-in-eight-days.html?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2013-0104-GLOBAL|mg21729104.100&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_content=mg21729104.100

WITHIN just eight days of starting a novel gene therapy, David Aponte's "incurable" leukaemia had vanished. For four other patients, the same happened within eight weeks, although one later died from a blood clot unrelated to the treatment, and another after relapsing.

The cured trio, who were all previously diagnosed with usually fatal relapses of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, have now been in remission for between 5 months and 2 years. Michel Sadelain of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, co-leader of the group that designed the trial, says that a second trial of 50 patients is being readied, and the team is looking into using the technique to treat other cancers.

The key to the new therapy is identifying a molecule unique to the surface of cancer cells, then genetically engineering a patient's immune cells to attack it.

In acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, immune cells called B-cells become malignant. The team were able to target a surface molecule known as CD19 that is only present on B-cells. Doctors extracted other immune cells called T-cells from the patients. These were treated with a harmless virus, which installed a new gene redirecting them to attack all cells bearing CD19. When the engineered T-cells were reinfused into the patients, they rapidly killed all B-cells, cancerous or otherwise.

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Gene therapy cures leukaemia in eight days (Original Post) Flaxbee Apr 2013 OP
Thank goodness science is finally looking outside of the slash & burn model BrotherIvan Apr 2013 #1
kick and recommend this cure samsingh Apr 2013 #2
Promising. Baitball Blogger Apr 2013 #3

BrotherIvan

(9,126 posts)
1. Thank goodness science is finally looking outside of the slash & burn model
Mon Apr 1, 2013, 01:56 PM
Apr 2013

Perhaps we are finally on the right path to 'curing cancer' because we have been on the wrong one for so long. The greatest weapon the body has to kill off cancers is the immune system. I have never understood why doctors think it's logical to kill the immune system in order to treat cancer. And there's a whole lot of profit mixed up in this scenario which has kept us in this disastrous paradigm for far too long.

I have all my fingers and toes crossed that this works! I am so sad it is too late for my mother who is now bedridden due to what was supposed to be the lightest form of the new chemo pills and family members whose deaths were accelerated and who died in awful pain due to these barbaric treatments.

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