Have scientists found a cure for cancer?

Scientists claim they have found a cure for skin cancer – science fiction’s favourite plot device: cloning.

A 52-year-old man who was suffering from advanced skin cancer has been free of the disease for two years after going through the procedure.

The process – named ‘immunotherapy’ - involved taking cancer-fighting cells from the man’s immune system, making five billion copies of them and then putting them back.

Scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle published their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, and believe this could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.

Okay, so we are pretty excited here at DietPixie, but the experts have urged caution.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the study, insisted more tests need to be carried out first.

He said:

“For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”

Speaking to the Beeb, Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, also refused to get carried away.

He said:

“It’s very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body.

“While it’s always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used.”

Okay, consider us brought back down to earth.

So how does the treatment work exactly? Well, what they did was take a sample of the man’s white blood cells.

From there, they were able to select CD4+ T cells, which had been specifically found on the surface of the melanoma cells.

These cells were then multiplied in the lab, and put back to fight the disease.
After two months, the tumours had disappeared – and two years later the man is still cancer-free.

All right, we are still a little excited. And so is Prof Karol Sikora, who is a cancer expert at Imperial College in London.

Speaking to the BBC, he felt the ground-breaking treatment could be applied to other forms of cancer.

He said:

“I think we will be able to harness the power of the immune system. Eventually we will learn how to control cancer, in other words we will suppress it.

“Patients will live with their cancer, and die with their cancer, but not of their cancer - it will be like diabetes today.”