Tumours had spread to Judy’s liver. 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 lethally 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 £400,000.
U.S. 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. This 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 immune 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 expensive for the NHS. The drug rationing watchdog the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is expected to reject Yescarta — the first CAR-T drug to be assessed — due to the high cost.
Professor David Cunningham, a consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden in London, says: ‘Harvesting and modifying a patient’s T-cells can cost around £500,000 per patient. That is prohibitive.’
However, in June, U.S. researchers announced that they may have discovered a cheaper way of creating CAR-T cancer-killing cells. Rather
than taking immune cells out of each individual patient, the scientists, from the Universities of California and Minnesota, say they may be able to mass-produce cancer-destroying immune cells from human stem cells.
In the journal Cell Stem Cell, they reported that they can produce a ‘natural killer cell’ to identify and kill all tumours.
Dan Kaufman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study, said: ‘One batch of stem cell-derived natural killer cells can potentially be used to treat thousands of patients.’
Professor Kaufman said that the new drugs have already shown considerable curative promise in experiments in mice.
Further trials will be needed before the worth of this approach is proven — so it is still, at best, several years before it is available to more patients. Even so, it is a tantalising hope.