Woman Cured of Advanced Breast Cancer

For the first time Judy Perkins, a 49-year-old engineer from Florida,with late-stage breast cancer has been completely cured by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.
She was treated by a team led by Dr Steven Rosenberg at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Maryland. The treatment, which succeeded after all other conventional treatments had failed, marks the first successful application of T-cell immunotherapy for late-stage breast cancer.
Judy Perkins was selected to undergo the cutting edge treatment after several chemotherapy sessions had failed to kill the tumour, which had begun to spread to her liver. Before the new treatment, doctors had given her three years to live.
The clinical trial, which is still ongoing, used modified T-cells – which make up part the body’s immune response – to tackle the patient’s tumours.
Doctors caring for Ms Perkins during her recovery described her return to health as “remarkable”. She has now been entirely free of cancer for two years.
“My condition deteriorated a lot towards the end, and I had a tumour pressing on a nerve, which meant I spent my time trying not to move at all to avoid pain shooting down my arm. I had given up fighting,” Perkins said. “After the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike.”
The dramatic success has raised hopes that the therapy will work in more patients with advanced breast cancer and other difficult to treat cancers, such as ovarian and prostate. Researchers are now planning full scale clinical trials to assess how effective the treatment could be.
But experts caution that the treatment has only proved itself in one woman and that the clinical trials are needed to see how effective the therapy could be in other cancer patients. Researchers point out that while the treatment could in principle work for many different kinds of cancer, it will not help everyone.
>Juthy Saha