So much promise for the future....I'm pasting the article, as the link is paywalled....from the Wall Street Journal....
Immunotherapy Treatments for Cancer Gain MomentumIn recent case, woman with metastatic breast cancer is cancer-free after infusion of immune cells at National Cancer InstituteThe science of using immunotherapy to treat cancer is advancing rapidly, marked by the National Cancer Institute’s recent disclosure that a metastatic breast-cancer patient is now cancer-free, regulators’ expected approval of a major lymphoma treatment this fall and the unveiling Thursday of a partnership between government researchers and drugmakers.
Immunotherapy, or immune-cell therapy, describes a range of treatments that harness a patient’s own immune system to target cancer. The approach doesn’t work in all patients, but its success against some hard-to-treat cancers makes it the most closely watched area in cancer pharmaceuticals.
Underscoring the rapid advances, the National Institutes of Health and the NCI Thursday announced a $215 million medical collaboration with 11 medical companies, including AbbVie, Novartis AG and Johnson & Johnson. The NIH will contribute $160 million over five years to the research, and the companies will contribute $55 million.
Meanwhile a lymphoma drug from Kite Pharma Inc., expected to be approved soon, would be the second immunotherapy drug of its type to get a green light from the Food and Drug Administration and has promise for thousands of patients with a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that resisted other treatments. Kite agreed in August to be acquired by drug giant Gilead Sciences Inc. for about
$11 billion, based on the hopes for the therapy.
Called axi-cel, the Kite medicine stems from a yearslong scientific collaboration with the NCI, underscoring the government agency’s central role in developing immunotherapies. NCI was the first to develop an experimental immunotherapy called CAR T, for “chimeric antigen receptor,” a kind of genetically-engineered immune cell. The NCI, a division of the National Institutes of Health, transferred the technology to develop the drug to Kite, and the company has paid up to $3 million a year to support the research.
The FDA recently approved another gene-based immunotherapy, Novartis’s Kymriah, for a form of leukemia.
In the another significant development, the cancer institute’s prominent cancer researcher and chief of surgery, Steven A. Rosenberg, detailed for the first time an immunotherapy success against metastatic breast cancer, in a talk earlier this month.
In the lecture at a Boston meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, Dr. Rosenberg reported on the first patient with metastatic breast cancer who is disease-free nearly two years after her first immunotherapy treatment. In the therapy, a person’s own cells are multiplied billions of times and reinfused into the patient. Dr. Rosenberg’s lab has already reported successes in treatment of melanoma, lymphoma, colorectal cancer and bile-duct cancer.
That patient is Judy Perkins, a 51-year-old structural engineer from Port St. Lucie, Fla. She was diagnosed with metastatic cancer—cancer that spread beyond the original
location—in 2013. Then she underwent multiple regimens of chemotherapy and other standard treatment, to little avail. But she learned of the NCI research, and in August 2015, doctors in Bethesda harvested her immune cells. In December 2015, she got an infusion of her own, intensified immune cells. Driving home, she says she already could feel a tumor that had shrunk. “I thought this thing could be working,” she says.
By May 2016, her scans at the NCI came back clean—no detectable cancer. They have stayed clean, including during a visit to the NCI in Bethesda, Md., just last week.
Ms. Perkins is only one case. But the fact that she had metastatic breast cancer that is no longer detectable makes it very consequential. It follows reports from the Rosenberg lab about
other internal-organ cancers, specifically colorectal and bile-duct.
“We now see this treatment as a blueprint. We’ve taken the first steps in treatment of these common solid-tumor cancers that don’t respond to anything,” he says. But he cautions, “Each patient is a puzzle.”
Dr. Rosenberg’s interest in immunotherapy was piqued three decades ago, when he was struck by a chance encounter with a stomach-cancer patient who improbably recovered despite no treatment. This became a lifelong quest to discover how that patient had in effect cured himself. Scores of recoveries at the cancer institute of melanoma and lymphoma patients followed after immunotherapy treatment from his lab.
Now, his lab is exploring the promise of treating and accomplishing tumor regressions in far-more-common solid-tumor cancers of internal organs, including the breast, colon and bile-duct.
about
90% of the approximately 600,000 annual cancer deaths in the U.S. stem from metastatic disease in linings of internal organs.
Otis Brawley, chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, called the NCI breast-cancer success a “huge, really important lead that needs to be followed up on.”
But, he cautioned, “Some patients do well on a therapy and then some don’t. Then we start tweaking the therapy.”
Underscoring the optimism in hallways of the Rosenberg lab is a photo of the actor Mr. T glowering over the caption, “Do not enter unless you pity the cancer cells.”
At any given time, about
a dozen patients are under treatment by the Rosenberg team at the NIH Clinical Center. They are either getting their cells harvested, getting them reinfused—or being treated for side effects ranging from minimal to decreases in lung and kidney function. Hundreds of other patients are being followed after treatment.
“Our hypothesis,” says Dr. Rosenberg, “is that immunotherapies work because they target unique mutations in that person’s cancer.”
At lab meetings each week, doctors, scientists and other members of the 30-person lab meet to hear the latest science. Mostly, it is about
cancer mutations that may be good targets for immunotherapy—and how to isolate the patient’s own cells to target them.
The same day that Ms. Perkins came for her latest checkup, so did the first patient ever to receive the immunotherapy that now is Kite’s product. Eric Karlson, 55, a marine-construction worker on Marco Island, Fla., got an all-clear result too. Fifteen years ago, he had felt a lump on the side of his neck that turned out to be non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now, under the NCI protocol of immunotherapy, he has been disease-free for nearly nine years, and the cancer institute says he now doesn’t need to be seen more than yearly.
Other cases show the challenges that remain. The now cancer-free Ms. Perkins had a friend, Cindy Krieg of Boca Raton, Fla., who was also was an NCI patient. The two had met in a Florida oncologist’s waiting room when Mrs. Krieg, crying, had just gotten a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. Mrs. Krieg’s new friend told her about
Dr. Rosenberg’s work.
Mrs. Krieg came to Bethesda and, on June 23, had her own intensified immune cells infused. Originally from Cape Cod, Mass., she hoped to spend another summer there.
She spent the summer in Cape Cod, but died there Oct. 3.
Write to Thomas M. Burton at tom.burton@wsj.com
Post Edited (Pratoman) : 10/12/2017 8:58:45 PM (GMT-6)