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A patient whose skin cancer had spread throughout his body has been given the all-clear after being injected with billions of his own immune cells. Tests revealed that the 52-year-old man's tumours, which spread from his skin to his lung and groin, vanished within two months of having the treatment, and had not returned two years later.
Doctors attempted the experimental therapy as part of a clinical trial after the man's cancer failed to respond to conventional treatments.
The man is the first to benefit from the new technique, which uses cloning to produce billions of copies of a patient's immune cells. When they are injected into the body they attack the cancer and force it into remission.
The founder of the Think Pink cancer charity in Bahrain, Australian Julie Sparkel, said: "Globally one out of every eight to 10 women will develop breast cancer and in Bahrain 74 new breast cancer cases are diagnosed every year.
Julie, an intensive care nurse at a local hospital, was prompted to help raise awareness and funds by a family history of breast cancer and a benign lump she had a few years ago.
Cassian Yee at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle extracted immune cells from the patient and found that a small proportion of them, called CD4 T cells, naturally attacked a protein found on nearly three-quarters of the cancer cells. Using cloning techniques, Yee's team replicated these cells until they had more than five billion of them.
When the cells were injected into the patient they immediately began attacking the cancer. Intriguingly, the patient's immune system gradually began a wider offensive, attacking all the cancer cells in the body, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two months later medical scans failed to pick up any signs of cancer in the patient.
The team believes the treatment could be effective in around a quarter of skin cancer patients whose immune systems have cells that are already primed to attack their tumours.
