There's news from England of yet another encouraging treatment for some forms of cancer. This treatment involves selecting the few immune cells in the patient's body which fight cancer and cloning them so that billions of them can be injected back into the patient:
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.
The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure. After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.
Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy". After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.
The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.
It's wonderful to think that perhaps within the lifetimes of many who are reading this a death from cancer will be as unusual as a death from small pox or polio.
RLC
