A promising step in fight against cancer

By Roger Highfield

Does this mark the end of cancer? No. But it's a promising end to the first chapter of "immunotherapy", the effort to harness the body's own defences.

In 1991, I visited Steven Rosenberg at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, the pioneer of immunotherapy.

In 1969, he found out that a patient who wanted a gall bladder removed had been sent home to die more than a decade earlier with stomach cancer.

Spontaneous remission is vanishingly rare and he told me "this patient's body had in some way reacted against the cancer."

By the time of my visit, Dr Rosenberg had become the first to attack cancer - melanoma - using white blood cells that had undergone a gene transplant to make them attack tumours.

But it was only in 2006 that he announced he had cleared a patient.

Doctors avoid saying "cure" because the disease often returns but Dr Rosenberg tells me "Mark Origer remains disease free, over three years after treatment."

Now a simpler immunotherapy has been successfully used by Dr Cassian Yee who adds it might be adapted to other cancers.

But there is a need for large scale trials, which is tricky because the method is too expensive and complex for an average hospital.

Immunotherapy could still be closer to a fluke than cure.

RESOURCE/SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk on Wednesday June 18, 2008.