Gene Therapy a Cautious Success Against Leukemia

It featured just five patients, but all five leukemia patients in a recent study achieved rapid and complete remission following gene therapy.

The patients are between the ages of 23 and 66, and all were diagnosed with relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) following standard chemotherapy. One patient was cancer-free just eight days after treatment began.

The procedure calls for taking T-cells, the infection- and disease-fighting cells of the immune system, and modifying them genetically in order to target a protein common to all ALL cells, CD19. The patient then receives the engineered cells, and they now hunt down the leukemia cells.

The findings were reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Lead author Renier J. Brentjens, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, called the results "a very promising step forward."

ALL is a very rare disease with about 6,000 new cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Two-thirds of ALL patients are children.

While one patient was in remission after just eight days, the longest it took for any other patient was 59 days. However, one patient died 90 days later, and another died following complications of a bone marrow transplant.

Source: WSJ

More Articles

More Articles

Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...

The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...

Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...

Radiation Therapy Topics

...

At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...

Site Beginnings

This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...

Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...

The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...

Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...

New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...

Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...

Sitemap