In one of the biggest advances against leukemia and other blood cancers in many years, doctors are reporting unprecedented success by using gene therapy to transform patients' blood cells into soldiers that seek and destroy cancer. A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.
"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janis Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."
In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.
These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.
Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pa., that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.
Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.
Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.
The treatment involves filtering patients' blood.........
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Poster Comment:
The rest is at the link. This is truly exciting stuff,boys and girls. I first read about nano-technology in the pages of Analog magazine back in the early 80's,and it seemed so far-fetched it might never happen. Yet here it is a couple of decades later,and it is already saving lives. Give it another couple of decades at most,and most hereditary diseases will be a thing of the past,and so will birth defects like Downes Syndrome. Providing of course the governments medical committees will approve spending the money to extend lives at a time when they will be trying to get people to die and have fewer children.
