17 December 2012
A seven-year-old girl with a
highly aggressive form of leukaemia may have been 'cured' by an experimental
therapy that harnesses the body's immune system to seek out and destroy the
disease.
Emily Whitehead was recruited to a small scale clinical trial,
involving 10 adults and two children at the Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania (HUP) and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), USA after
she relapsed twice following standard chemotherapy.
Emily's
own T cells - specialised immune cells - were removed and
genetically modified using an incapacitated version of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Scientists used this virus to arm the T cells with a protein called chimeric
antigen receptor (CAR). This molecule is capable of distinguishing cancer cells
from the healthy ones by binding to another protein called CD19, which is found
on the surface of cancer cells in leukaemia. Once reprogrammed in this way,
Emily's T cells were injected back into her body, where they were able to detect
and attack the cancer in the same way they would a foreign infection.
'Three weeks after receiving the treatment, she was in remission. Emily completely
responded to her T cell therapy', said Dr Stephen Grupp, a paediatric
oncologist at CHOP, whose team led the trial. 'We checked her bone marrow for
the possibility of disease again at three months and six months out from her
treatment, and she still has no disease whatsoever. The cancer-fighting T cells
are still there in her body', he added.
Emily had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) - the most common type of
childhood cancer. While 85 percent of children with ALL recover after two years
of standard chemotherapy, 15 percent remain resistant to such treatment. For
this group, the only current option is to undergo bone marrow transplants,
which carry a 20 percent mortality risk and often fails to rid the body of the
disease. Professor Carl June, from the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson
Cancer Centre, said: 'It is possible that in the future, this approach may
reduce or replace the need for bone marrow transplantation'.
Nonetheless, the results are preliminary and three of the 12 patients in
the trial did not respond to the therapy. Scientists are now calling for much
larger clinical trials. The University of Pennsylvania, in partnership with
Novartis, recently announced plans to build a Centre for Advanced Cellular
Therapies (CACT) in Philadelphia to further explore the potential of T cell
immunotherapy in the ongoing battle against cancer.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
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Medical News Today
|
12 December 2012
|
|
54th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition
|
10 December 2012
|
|
Daily Telegraph
|
11 December 2012
|
|
Mail Online
|
10 December 2012
|
|
EurekAlert! (press release)
|
9 December 2012
|
|
Medical News Today
|
10 December 2012
|
|
ITV News
|
11 December 2012
|
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