» Doctors Cure a Skin Cancer Using Patient’s Own Immune Cells » Ningin

I’m posting this because it’s a huge medical breakthrough and the team appears to be led by Asian or Asian American scientists:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080618212711.38ht6zq0&show_article=1

US doctors have for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system, a study released Wednesday showed. The ground-breaking treatment for advanced melanoma, or skin cancer, led to a long remission for the patient and used his own cloned infection-fighting T-cells, said doctor Cassian Yee, the lead author of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yee and his associates from the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose melanoma had spread to a groin lymph node and to one of his lungs. The melanoma was already well advanced and in stage four.

The T-cells which specifically fight melanoma were modified and expanded in the laboratory and some five billion cells were then infused into the patient, who received no other kind of treatment. Two months later no tumors were found during scans of the patient’s organs. And he has been cancer free for two years, Yee said.

6 Comments »

Comments merged with the forum topic: Doctors Cure a Skin Cancer Using Patient’s Own Immune Cell

jin said 06/19/08 12:14 pm

Isn’t cloning illegal?

peachgaru said 06/19/08 12:53 pm

I thought so too but hey they cured cancer

Loverly said 06/20/08 6:03 am

They can cure a lot of things if cloning was allowed

yanno said 06/20/08 8:03 am

Cloning won’t be approved of for a long time. I’m surprised they’re cloning animals right now

LilyPixel said 06/24/08 6:37 am

I remember Japan cloning dogs but they died eventually. So sad because they were so cute.

cyee said 07/05/08 4:23 am

hi alvin and posters,
this is cassian, the guy in the photo holding up what appears to be blue toilet water. i don’t recall ever using a reagent of that color but bluish liquid is more interesting than murky grey.

about ‘cloning’:
when we use the word ‘clone’, it has nothing to do with embryonic stem cells or cloning humans - a clone is a replicate or copy of something, and in this case, it is a copy of the cancer-fighting T cell that we isolate from patients who were treated on the study. these cancer-fighting t cells are rare, in the order of 1 in 10, 000 to 1 in 1,000,000 in the blood and it takes several weeks of growing cells in a lab culture dish to enrich for the population of T cells that can recognize the melanoma cells. we screen hundreds to thousands of single T cells (i.e. single T cell clones) to identify the clone that can recognize and kill the cancer cell efficiently. we take that single T cell clone and expand it several thousand-fold- so now there are billions of the same T cell that we isolated, or rather, the same T cell clone. We now have 15 to 20 billion of these T cell clones (that arose from the one T cell we screened eariler) and we infuse these cancer-fighting, antigen-specific, CD4 T cell clones into patients (much like a blood transfusion) in the hope that these T cells will circulate to tumor sites, eradicate the tumor and then remain longterm in the patient as ‘memory’ T cells to prevent a recurrence.

i hope that clarifies things - ‘cloning’ has become such a ethically and politically charge term that sometimes it seems to have lost it’s original meaning.

(Alvin - thank you btw for increasing awareness to melanoma, clinical trials and our research_),
best regards
cassian yee

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