World First As Doctors Eradicate Woman’s Advanced Breast Cancer
52-year-old Judy Perkins from Florida was selected for a groundbreaking new therapy after several rounds of chemotherapy failed to stop a tumor that was growing in her right breast. The tumor continued to grow and spread around her body, including to her liver. Perkins was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after being given only three years to live.
The new therapy harnessed the power of her own immune system to fight the tumor, and proved to be incredibly successful. Perkins has now been cancer-free for two years, and its all thanks to her own immune system. T-cell immunotherapy is what was used to rid Perkins of cancer, and hopefully we’ll be hearing more and more stories like this in the coming years.
T-cell immunotherapy has a few steps, and the first step was to remove some of the tissue from the Perkins’ tumors. Once doctors removed the tissue, the tissue’s DNA was studied to find mutations specific to the cancer. The mutations that were key are the ones that disrupted four of Perkins’ genes, producing a variety of abnormal proteins in her tumors. Doctors then extract tumor infiltrating lymphocytes – TILs – that invaded the tumor in an attempt to kill it.
Once billions of these cells were grown in a lab, researchers screened them to find the ones that will be most effective at destroying the tumor. Once the correct TIL were found, 80 billion of them were injected back into Perkins and 42-weeks later tests showed that she was completely cancer free.
“It feels miraculous, and I am beyond amazed that I have now been free of cancer for two years. I had resigned my job and was planning on dying. I had a bucket-list of things I needed to do before the end, like going to the Grand Canyon. Now, I have gone back to normal everyday life,” Perkins said.
Doctors are currently unsure how much the T-cell immunotherapy contributed to the remission of her cancer, as Perkins was given pembrolizumab alongside the therapy. However, pembrolizumab has not proven to be very effective at fighting advanced breast cancer in the past. The T-cells that were injected into Perkins were still found in her system at least 17 months after the treatment began.
This therapy is complex and expensive, and director of research at Breast Cancer Now Simon Vincent said:
“This is a remarkable and extremely promising result, but we need to see this effect repeated in other patients before giving hope of a new immunotherapy for incurable metastatic breast cancer.”
“Metastatic breast cancer remains incurable, and if we are to finally stop women dying we urgently need to find new ways to target and stop the spread of the disease. We are thrilled by this early finding, but we must remember that this type of immunotherapy remains an experimental approach that has a long way to go before it might be routinely available to patients.”
