Therapy wipes out leukemia: study

Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia turning the patients own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.They have only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.“It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last.”Earlier attempts at genetically modifying bloodstream soldiers called T-cells have had limited success; the modified cells didnt reproduce well and quickly disappeared.