The treatment is similar to one that pull a seven year old
girl, Emma whitehead, from death’s door into a remission nearly a year ago and
that has had astounding success in several adults with chronic leukaemia in
home chemotherapy had failed. The treatment regimen that saved Emma and those
adults was developed at university of Pennsylvania. Related studies have been
done at national cancer institute.
But this cell therapy approach had not been tried before in
adults with the disease that Emma had, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. This type
of blood cancer is worse in adults than in children, with a cure rate in adults
of only about 40% compared with 80% to 90% in children. The disease is not
common. Each year in the u. s, it affects about 2400 people older than 20, and
3600 younger. Though there are fewer cases in adults, there are more deaths:
about 1170 adults die each year compared with 270 deaths in people under 20.
In adults, this type of leukaemia is a “devastating,
galloping disease,” said Dr Michel Sadelain, the senior author of the new study
and Director of the Centre for Cell Engineering and the Gene Transfer and Gene
Expression Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
Patients like the once in the study usually have only a few month
left, he said. But now, three of the five have been in remission for 5 to 24
months. To others “one was in remission but died from blood clot, and the other
relapsed. The survivors have had bone marrow transplants. They are prognosis is
good but relapse is still possible.
The treatment is experimental, has been used in only small
number of patients and did not work in all of them. But experts consider it a
highly promising approach for a variety of malignancies, including other blood
cancer and tumours in organs like the prostate gland. The new study, in 5
adults with acute leukaemia in whom chemotherapy had failed, was published in
the journal science translational medicine.