‘Terminal’ breast cancer wiped out by new treatment

Experts say many cancers are preventable

An experimental new therapy for advanced breast cancer is being
hailed as a ‘paradigm shift’ in treating the disease.

The first patient to undergo the treatment, Judy
Perkins, was diagnosed with incurable stage 4 breast cancer in
2013, ten years after undergoing a mastectomy for an earlier bout
with the disease.

When she was selected for the trial in 2015, the Florida woman
“had tennis ball-sized tumours in her liver and secondary cancers
throughout her body”.

Believing she had less than three months to
live, she had left her job as a structural engineer and was working
her way through a “bucket list” of activities to complete before
she died.

Perkins told the BBC that she began to feel the effects of the
experimental treatment after a week. “I had a tumour in my chest
that I could feel shrinking,” she said.

“It took another week or two for it to
completely go away.”

More than two years on, she is cancer-free and says she
has “gone back to normal everyday life”, even enjoying strenuous
hiking and kayaking trips.

“It feels miraculous and I am beyond amazed,”
the 52-year-old said. “Experts may call it extended remission but I
call it a cure.”

Her case, detailed in the
journal Nature Medicine, involves a new treatment
which harnesses the body’s own immune system to destroy
cancerous cells. It works by flooding the body with T-cells, a
component of white blood cells with the ability to seek and destroy
cancerous cells.

Scientists analysed Perkins’ biopsies to
identify the T-cells which were already attacking a handful of the
62 cancerous mutations in her body.

“They removed a few hundred of those T-cells and over
eight weeks grew 82 billion of them, which were then placed back
into her body,” The Times reports.

The technique has previously been used to treat
blood cancers and melanoma, but “it is the first time the treatment
has been successful for late-stage breast cancer”.

The team of doctors complemented the cell treatment
with “a range of new immunotherapy drugs called ‘checkpoint
inhibitors’,” Sky News reports, “designed to overcome a
cancer’s ability to shield itself from the immune system”.

Researchers were keen to stress that more trials
on greater numbers of patients will need to be carried out before
the therapy could come into wider use.

The highly personalised nature of the treatment
is simultaneously its greatest strength and the biggest obstacle to
widespread use.

Previous trials involving cancer immunotherapy
have found that it “tends to work spectacularly for some patients,
but the majority do not benefit”, the BBC reports.

Dr Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the
National Cancer Institute, which led the trial, told the
broadcaster that the therapy remained “highly experimental”, but
had the potential to transform cancer treatment.

“A lot of work needs to be done, but the
potential exists for a paradigm shift in cancer therapy – a unique
drug for every cancer patient,” he said. “It is very different to
any other kind of treatment.”