Big breakthrough: In world's first, woman cured of advanced breast cancer through immunotherapy

Major breakthrough in breast cancer treatment  |  Photo Credit: Thinkstock

New Delhi: In what is being hailed as a world's first, a woman with advanced breast cancer which defied chemotherapy and spread to other organs has been completely cured of the disease through an experimental treatment that triggered her immune system, the researchers reported on Monday. According to the researchers at the US National Cancer Institute, the 49-year-old woman has been cancer-free for two years. Other experts not involved in the work described it as 'exciting’.

The groundbreaking cancer treatment, which is still in the experimental phase, has been detailed in the journal Nature Medicine. Doctors say it could transform the way all cancers are treated. The US-based team, who presented their results as ‘a new immunotherapy approach’ for the treatment of patients with a late-stage form of cancer, cautioned that the technique is ‘highly specialised and complex’ and may not be suitable for many patients.

According to the study, Judy Perkins signed up for the clinical trial after several attempts at a cure through conventional treatments had failed. She had tennis-ball sized tumours in her liver and secondary cancers elsewhere in her body that could not be treated with routine chemotherapy. Read - 'Blue light' may trigger breast, prostate cancer: Eat these six foods to reduce your risk

Judy, who lives in Florida, was given three months to live, but two years later, there is no sign of cancer in her body, the BBC reported.

In the current trial, the researchers extracted immune cells called lymphocytes from the woman’s body, tweaked them in the lab, then reinjected them back into the patient, news agency AFP reported. The pioneering new therapy involved pumping 90 billion cancer-killing immune cells into her body. A person's immune system is designed to kill invaders, including rogue, cancerous cells. But it can fail, often because it cannot recognise cancer cells containing the patient's own DNA. Immunotherapy trains a patient's own immune cells to recognise and fight cancer.

The results were remarkable as the immunotherapy treatment successfully treated her cancer, dissolving most of her tumours.

“These were reactivated or ‘switched on’ in the lab and injected back, along with a so-called ‘immune checkpoint inhibitor’ -- another type of immunotherapy that has shown success in other types of cancer. This resulted in a ‘highly personalised’ anti-cancer therapy that yielded ‘complete tumour regression,’ the researchers wrote.

Dr Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, described the procedure as ‘the most highly personalised treatment imaginable’, adding it will need to be tested in large-scale trials to confirm its success, but the potential for it to be used to treat other cancers is huge.

“This is highly experimental and we're just learning how to do this, but potentially it is applicable to any cancer,” he told the BBC.

This work showed ‘we are now at the cusp of a major revolution in finally realising the elusive goal of being able to target the plethora of mutations in cancer through immunotherapy,’ expert Laszlo Radvanyi from Canada's Ontario Institute for Cancer Research wrote.

The trial has been hailed as ‘fascinating and exciting by immunotherapy professor Alan Melcher of The Institute of Cancer Research in a reaction via the Science Media Centre in London.

“The study confirmed the immune system can recognise some cancers, and if this can be stimulated in the right way, even cancers that have spread to different parts of the body may be treatable,” Peter Johnson, an oncology professor at the Cancer Research UK Centre, added.