A 75-year-old California man has, after ten years of observation, been declared free of cancer after an immune cell treatment wiped out his blood cancer and a decade passed without it returning.
The treatment is one of several next-generation treatments for cancer, called CAR-T cell therapy, which retrains one of the most effective immune cells to target cancer fast, and then stay on patrol for years, evolving to keep the cancer at bay.
“I’m doing great right now. I’m still very active. I was running half marathons until 2018,” Doug Olson who lives in Pleasanton, California, told local news. “This is a cure. And they don’t use the word lightly.”
In fact, it was only three weeks after the experimental treatment was administered that Olson’s University of Pennsylvania doctors, Carl June and David Porter, got to sit Olson down and tell him the good news that they were not able to find a single cancer cell in his body.
The cancer-fighting paradigm for years had been to attack cancer cells radioactively, or with other chemicals, due to the cancer’s ability to disguise itself from the host’s immune system. Now several methods of therapies that involve reconfiguring the immune system to do its job right are being used on thousands of patients.
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CAR stands for the protein “chimeric antigen receptors” which can detect tumors and allow the T-cells to attack them. They’re extracted from the patient, genetically-engineered to produce CAR, and then reintroduced. So far, five such treatments have been approved by the FDA to treat leukemias, lymphomas, and myelomas. Dr. June estimates that tens of thousands of people have received CAR-T cell treatment so far.
While it can cure people, it’s not a miracle cure. It remains expensive and technically demanding, while leading to only around 25%-35% of people into total remission, as is the case with Olson. Dr. June and Porter believe that with continual refinement, that percentage can increase.
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As for Olson, he’s regularly running with his son to try and keep himself in prime condition. “If my cancer was gone, I certainly didn’t want to die of a heart attack,” he told Nature.
(WATCH the ABC6 video for this story below.)
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