Tumours had spread to Judy’s liver but today she’s cancer-free
JUDY PERKINS, 51, an engineer from Florida, amazed the world when her doctors revealed that her breast cancer, which had spread to her liver, had been eradicated.
Two years ago, she had been given only three years to live. But then she had an intricate — and expensive — new cancer therapy.
‘I had given up fighting,’ Judy told reporters.
‘But, after the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike.’
Judy is living proof of the promise of immunotherapy. But there is one massive problem: the expense. Judy’s treatment is estimated to have cost €446,000.
US doctors treated Judy with an advanced form of immunotherapy called CAR-T cell therapy.
This genetically alters a patient’s T-cells — the ‘troops’ in the immune system — so that they recognise and attack specific proteins found on cancer cells.
The treatment is already being used on a small number of patients with blood cancers, such as leukaemia.
Doctors took tissue from Judy’s tumours, studied its DNA for mutations specific to her cancer and extracted immune cells that had invaded the tumour to try to kill it.
After growing billions of these cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which would attack Judy’s mutated cancer cells.
The doctors reported in the journal Nature Medicine in June how they injected 80 billion of these immune cells into Judy’s body, along with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab.
As it stands, this procedure is too