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Patients with acute myeloid leukemia who relapse after stem cell transplantation have just a small chance of survival: doctors can give them additional donor T cells to fight the cancer, but only about 20 percent of patients go back into remission. Scientists didn’t know why these T cells aren’t working against AML, but a paper published in Science Translational Medicine on October 28 uncovers the mechanism, as well as a simple, inexpensive treatment that can reactivate them: sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda.
“This is an elegant study,” says physician-scientist Nataliya Buxbaum, who researches T cell metabolism at the National Cancer Institute and who wasn’t involved in this study. “Relapsed AML is very difficult to treat, so if something rudimentary, like sodium bicarb, which is available at every hospital, can augment the immune response, it’s certainly interesting.”
AML is a disease that attacks the blood-forming ...
