An experimental new therapy for advanced breast cancer is being hailed as a ‘paradigm shift’ in treating the disease.
The first patient to undergo the treatment, Judy Perkins, was diagnosed with incurable stage 4 breast cancer in 2013, ten years after undergoing a mastectomy for an earlier bout with the disease.
When she was selected for the trial in 2015, the Florida woman “had tennis ball-sized tumours in her liver and secondary cancers throughout her body”.
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Believing she had less than three months to live, she had left her job as a structural engineer and was working her way through a “bucket list” of activities to complete before she died.
Perkins told the BBC that she began to feel the effects of the experimental treatment after a week. “I had a tumour in my chest that I could feel shrinking,” she said.
“It took another week or two for it to completely go away.”
More than two years on, she is cancer-free and says she has “gone back to normal everyday life”, even enjoying strenuous hiking and kayaking trips.
“It feels miraculous and I am beyond amazed,” the 52-year-old said. “Experts may call it extended remission but I call it a cure.”
Her case, detailed in the journal Nature Medicine, involves a new treatment which harnesses the body’s own immune system to destroy cancerous cells. It works by flooding the body with T-cells, a component of white blood cells with the ability to seek and destroy cancerous cells.
Scientists analysed Perkins’ biopsies to identify the T-cells which were already attacking a handful of the 62 cancerous mutations in her body.
“They removed a few hundred of those T-cells and over eight weeks grew 82 billion of them, which were then placed back into her body,” The Times reports.
The technique has previously been used to treat blood cancers and melanoma, but “it is the first time the treatment has been successful for late-stage breast cancer”.
The team of doctors complemented the cell treatment with “a range of new immunotherapy drugs called ‘checkpoint inhibitors’,” Sky News reports, “designed to overcome a cancer's ability to shield itself from the immune system”.
Researchers were keen to stress that more trials on greater numbers of patients will need to be carried out before the therapy could come into wider use.
The highly personalised nature of the treatment is simultaneously its greatest strength and the biggest obstacle to widespread use.
Previous trials involving cancer immunotherapy have found that it “tends to work spectacularly for some patients, but the majority do not benefit”, the BBC reports.
Dr Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, which led the trial, told the broadcaster that the therapy remained “highly experimental”, but had the potential to transform cancer treatment.
“A lot of work needs to be done, but the potential exists for a paradigm shift in cancer therapy - a unique drug for every cancer patient,” he said. “It is very different to any other kind of treatment.”