Recent advances in an immune-cell cancer treatment, a type of immunotherapy, using engineered immune cells to target specific molecules on cancer cells, are producing dramatic results for people with cancer, according to Stanley Riddell, MD, an immunotherapy researcher and oncologist.
Riddell and his colleagues have refined new methods of engineering a patient’s own immune cells to better target and kill cancer cells while decreasing side effects. In laboratory and clinical trials, the researchers are seeing “dramatic responses” in patients with tumors that are resistant to conventional high-dose chemotherapy, “providing new hope for patients with many different kinds of malignancies,” Riddell said.
“The results are simply astounding,” Riddell said. We are treating patients with advanced leukemia and lymphoma that have failed every conventional therapy and radiation therapy, including transplants, in a single treatment. Within weeks, the patient goes into remission.”
“In my years as a oncologist and as a research scientist, I have never seen a treatment that has that spectacular response rate in its initial testing in patients,” Riddell said. His team is initiating trials in lung, breast, sarcoma, melanoma, and soon in pancreatic cancer. The opportunities for this technology are “incredible” and the approach has the potential to also treat common cancers such as kidney and colon cancer, he said.
“We are at the precipice of a revolution in cancer treatment based on using immunotherapy.”