Cancer Cure News 2017: New Experimental Therapy Found to Cure Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
A new experimental therapy that is a step beyond bone marrow transplants is giving hope to patients battling a special type of blood cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T), it involves getting samples of T-immune cells from a cancer patient, genetically engineering them and then putting them back to the body to fight cancer. So far, the therapy has already worked well in patients whose conditions did not get better with chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant.
According to Dr. Frederick Locke, an oncologist from the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, the body has different soldiers that have the ability to fight war, and what CAR-T therapy does is take out all these soldiers, give them a global positioning system (GPS) and tell them that they when they are put back in, they should go attack the enemy called lymphoma.
Locke revealed that more than one third of the patients who tried the treatment became tumor-free nine months later. One of them was Dimas Padilla, who is now in remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after receiving the CAR-T therapy.
"These are patients who really are without hope. Patients who at best could expect to have a one in 10 chance of having a complete disappearance of their lymphoma. So the results are really exciting and remarkable," said Locke.
He said, however, that while 80 percent of their 101 patients who received the therapy managed to stay alive six months later, the treatment is no cakewalk. According to Locke, it works pretty much the same way as other cancer treatments like the bone marrow transplant, in which the immune system of the patient has to be damaged so the newly engineered T-cells can do the job. The good news, however, is that having to go through the negative side effects is just a phase.
