In the United States, a woman with metastasized breast cancer is officially cured with immunotherapy. In addition to being a world first, it is a real hope, especially for cases where chemotherapy does not work.
This is a world first in the world of research. An American woman with advanced cancer was cured with immunotherapy. This experimental treatment, developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda and the University of Richmond (United States), replaced chemotherapy, which was not working. This patient has been considered to have recovered for two years. The results of this study are published in the journal Nature Medicine.
Make the immune system triumph
This woman was 49 years old when she started this new therapy. Her breast cancer had metastasized and had spread to other organs, such as the liver. The researchers took lymphocytes (cells of the immune system) from a tumor. These were then sorted to identify those that recognized cancer cells. Then, these were “manipulated” to be able to attack these cancer cells and destroy them.
Laszlo Radvanyi of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, Canada, speaks of an “unprecedented” response to treatment. “We are today at the dawn of a vast revolution, which will finally allow us to achieve the following goal: to target the plethora of mutations involved in cancer, through immunotherapy.”
This is the first time that immunotherapy has been shown to be effective in breast cancer. This technique, on the other hand, already shown to be effective in cancers of the lung, cervix, prostate, blood or even skin. On the other hand, it can trigger a reaction in healthy organs, such aseye.
Chemotherapy is no longer automatic
Immunotherapy can be an alternative to chemotherapy, which has serious side effects. One test was developed and presented recently at the 2018 ASCO Congress in Chicago. The latter, by analyzing 21 genes of the breast tumor, makes it possible to know whether chemotherapy can be replaced by hormone therapy after surgery.
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