US doctors treat cancer with cloned skin
Updated
American doctors have for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system.
The ground-breaking treatment for advanced melanoma, or skin cancer, led to a long remission for the patient and used his own cloned infection-fighting T-cells
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reports Cassian Yee and his associates from the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose melanoma had spread to a groin lymph node and to one of his lungs.
The melanoma was already well advanced and in stage four.
The T-cells which specifically fight melanoma were modified and expanded in the laboratory and some five billion cells were then infused into the patient, who received no other kind of treatment.
Two months later no tumours were found during scans of the patient's organs and he has been cancer free for two years.
It was the first ever case to show that cloned cells from a patient's own immune system can successful combat skin cancer.
The researchers say they were surprised by the success of the treatment, however the method's effectiveness will need to be confirmed in a larger study.
