New CLL treatment

[vanguardsheet]

There’s hope for CLL patients:
NBC News: 8 Aug 2011

Doctors have treated only three leukemia patients, but the sensational results from a single shot could be one of the most significant advances in cancer research in decades. And it almost never happened.

In the research published Wednesday, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania say the treatment made the most common type of leukemia completely disappear in two of the patients and reduced it by 70 percent in the third. In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later it is still gone.

The results of the preliminary test “exceeded our wildest expectations,” says immunologist Dr. Carl June a member of the Abramson Cancer Center’s research team.

Dr. Edgar Engleman, a cancer immunologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research calls the results “remarkable … great stuff.”

The Penn scientists targeted chroniclymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common type of the blood disease. It strikes some 15,000 people in the United States, mostly adults, and kills 4,300 every year. Chemotherapy and radiation can hold this form of leukemia at bay for years, but until now the only cure has been a bone marrow transplant. A bone marrow transplant requires a suitable match, works only about half the time, and often brings on severe, life-threatening side effects such as pain and infection.

More at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/ns/health-cancer/

"Don’t stop believin’!"

[Kenneth_In_Va]

The same article was referenced in the "MDS Beacon" this week. They call it the Penn Study.

Quote:

An approach similar to the Penn method could be used to treat MDS, although it would need to be modified so that the T-cells target MDS cells. Dr. Steensma said that the optimal way to target MDS cells is not yet clear. He also cautioned that a target needs to be carefully chosen, or the engineered T-cells could launch an autoimmune reaction against healthy cells too.

“Only with the more widespread clinical use of [engineered] T-cells will we learn whether the results…reflect an authentic advance toward a clinically applicable and effective therapy or yet another promising lead that runs into a barrier that cannot be easily overcome,” wrote Drs. Walter Urba and Dan Longo from the Chiles Research Institute in Portland, Oregon, in an editorial about the Penn study.

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