Adoptive Cell Transfer

It has been found that a new process called Adoptive Cell Transfer has shown promise for developing into a new therapy for the treatment of many types of cancer. In this procedure, the most aggressive tumor-killing immune cells are isolated from the patient and then duplicated. These duplicated superior cells then replace the patient’s other immune cells which don’t have the gene to seek and kill cancer. The immune cells targeted are called T-cells or lymphocytes (see figure 1).



<- Figure 1: There are many immune cells, demonstrating the versatility of the immune system. (OMUSA, “The immune system”)


However, these tumor killing cells are rare in patients, if they are even there at all. Hence, an improvement has been employed: a virus is injected into the normal immune cells of the patient. This virus is known to produce a protein that allows the cells to seek and destroy cancerous cells. It was found from research that a small minority of patients were “disease free” after several months, while the remaining majority still had 10% of the anticancer cells circulating in their immune system.

More research into improving this relatively unsuccessful procedure is being implemented, but much promise has already been observed.


References
OMUSA, “The immune system” (Accessed 17/3/09)

http://www.omsusa.org/pranzatelli-immune.htm

"Engineering a Cure: Genetically modified cells fight cancer", Christen Brownlee
http://www.phschool.com/science/science_news/biology/genetics.html

2 September 2006, Volume 170, No. 10, p. 147 (Science News) (Accessed 14/3/09)

Further Reading
Dudley, M.E. . . . and S.A. Rosenberg. 2002. Cancer regression and autoimmunity in patients after clonal repopulation with antitumor lymphocytes. Science 298(Oct. 25):850-854. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/298/5594/850