Souped-up immune cells force leukaemia into remission

I often comment on "promising" cancer therapies around here when people get too caught up in the hyperbole of press releases. This one however is a huge deal. For those of you following along at home, note that actual people (very, very sick people) who had basically no hope using standard care had their cancer obliterated. Note that the subjects were not rodents (we have cured rodent cancer a million times) and that at least some of the people have no detectable cancer anymore. Having worked in oncology research and development in pharma, I can tell you that outcomes are never this dramatic with patient populations like this one. This is true personalized medicine. It's straight out of science fiction. The science is crazy hard and the fact that it worked is just incredible to me. There are millions of ways this could have failed (and U. Penn is no stranger to the painful failure of gene therapy firsthand in the past). (Disclaimer: I work at an institution involved in the treatment, but have nothing to do with it at all).

This appears to build on similar work using modified T-cells against Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia from back in 2005 [1]

Fascinating stuff and it seems like all of the leukemias may fall to a strategy like this one.

One of the advantages of the use of this treatment in CLL was that patients were 'immunised' against recurrence of the cancer in the future. It seems that it is not yet known if this is the case for the treatment discussed here.

Nice to see that work is progressing by leaps and bounds in this area.

[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849