Cancer Immunotherapy Progresses

The Telegraph brings news of progress in cancer immunotherapy. Interestingly, this was a comparatively "simple" immune therapy - no genetic or other manipulation of immune cells, but rather generating a very large number of them, far more than the body would generate on its own. This is a similar approach to the first autologous stem cell therapies: "A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells ... 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 free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and 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. ... The patient was one of nine with metastatic melanoma, that is skin cancer that has spread, who were being treated in a recently completed clinical trial to test bigger and bigger doses of their own white blood cells. Larger, more elaborate, trials are now under way."

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/18/scicanc118.xml