New cancer treatment 'needs to be tested in large clinical trials'

London: A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors in Seattle disclose on Thursday.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure. After two years he is still clear of the disease, which had spread to his lymph nodes and to one of his lungs. Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as cell transfer immunotherapy or T-cell treatment. Experts said that the case could mark a major breakthrough in the treatment of cancer.

It raises the possibility of a new way of fighting the disease, which claims 150,000 lives in Britain every year.

Ed Yong, a health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all-clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used."

The treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness. Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.

Normally there are too few of the cells in a patient's body to fight cancer effectively. The American scientists behind the successful treatment were quick to point out that the breakthrough involved only a single patient.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said: "We were surprised by the anti-tumour effect of these CD4 T-cells and its duration of response.

"For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study."

Larger, more elaborate, trials are now under way. Cell transfer immunotherapy is part of a growing area of research that aims to develop less-toxic treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation.

- The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2008

step-by-step

Celltherapy

- Doctors identify one type of white blood cell which attacks cancer but is found in too few numbers in the body to be effective.

- They isolate the cell and grow five billion in sterile conditions.

- The cells are infused into the patient.

- There is no attempt, as has been the case previously, to use genetic engineering to boost the cells or to make them recognise and attack cancer cells.

- Two months after the treatment, scans should show that the cells have removed the cancer from the body.