ISTOCK, MELETIOS VERRASReactivating T cells in a woman with metastatic breast cancer eliminated her tumors, researchers report today (June 4) in Nature Medicine. It is the first time late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated with T-cell immunotherapy.
“We’re looking for a treatment—an immunotherapy—that can be broadly used in patients with common cancers,” study coauthor Steven Rosenberg, an oncologist and immunologist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), tells NPR. The result suggests this type of treatment might be possible for other types of solid tumors, including in the colon, rectum, and pancreas.
To develop the treatment, Rosenberg and his colleagues used whole-exome and RNA sequencing to identify point mutations within the genome of a patient’s breast tumor and then isolated tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes from the mass and identified which ones were reactive against mutations in the genes SLC3A2, ECPAS, CADPS2, and CTSB, which were present in her tumor. The researchers then infused into the patient roughly 90 billion tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes that targeted the four ...
