Immunotherapy is a type of treatment that prompts a patient’s own immune system to
fight cancer.
In this excerpt from the documentary film, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,”
Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, head of surgery at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for
Cancer Research, describes his pioneering work in this promising field.
He begins by recalling an inspirational encounter early in his career with a patient whose cancer
had disappeared without treatment.
All aspects of his cancer were gone.
He had undergone one of the most rare events in all of medicine.
He had had a spontaneous regression of all of his metastatic cancer.Rosenberg believed
that the explanation had to lie in the patient’s own immune system.
He decided then and there to focus his research on immune cells or “lymphocytes”.Ok, let’s
talk about admissions for this week.The body has hundreds of billions of lymphocytes.
And somewhere in the body of a cancer patient, there are lymphocytes, we hypothesized, that
could recognize what was different about the cancer.
So, Mark, let’s hear about cells.
I have Cermak on the NMA arm of the randomized protocol--It was that hypothesis, it was that
dream, that then led us to try and identify the actual cells that were attacking the cancer,
and use them to actually develop a cancer treatment.
Rosenberg isolated various types of immune cells in his lab and, in a series of clinical
trials, injected them into patients.
But progress was painfully slow.
In the first sixty-six patients, his therapy showed no signs of working.
Then, in 1984, he treated the sixty-seventh, a Navy officer, named Linda Taylor, with a
far higher dose.
Three decades later, she is still in perfect health.
I tell you, I never cry except around you.
It was an important event in the development of cancer treatments because it showed people
that it was possible, at that point in a very tiny percentage of patients, to cause the
immune system to make a cancer disappear.
The hope from those early experiments was that if you could somehow activate specific
aspects of the immune system, could you now educate it to attack a cancer cell and not
attack a normal cell.
Rosenberg went on to discover that a specific type of immune cell, called a t-cell, was
active against some cancers, but, when greatly outnumbered, was too weak to defeat them.
Through dozens of experimental trials, he learned to extract these cancer-fighting t-cells
from a patient’s own body, grow them in the lab into a vast army billions of cells
strong -- and then infuse them back into the patient’s body to fight his or her cancer.
So, in our last six evaluable patients, there are four complete regressions and two partial
regressions, so--We’re in the beginnings of a very long and hopefully exciting road
with immunological therapies.
There are people, who’ve dedicated their lives to this, and finally we’re beginning
to see interesting glimmers in which the immune system can be educated to start to see cancers
and to kill those cancers.