‘Designer cells’ reverse one-year-old’s cancer

What makes this case so unique is that “donor” cells were not rejected
Incidentally, Gavin, your today’s linkr of NCRI conference provides information on the process of T-cells for leukemia patients.

Professor June and his team are taking an interesting approach to this challenge. In particular, they’re developing new ways to turn the power of the immune system on leukaemia – a cancer caused by white blood cells (usually B cells, also part of the immune system themselves) growing out of control.

The conference finished with a talk by Dr Carl June, a giant in the field of immunotherapy.
He discussed his latest research into treating patients with their own immune cells by “engineering them to be better than nature made them”.

He has had great success using this technique to treat a small number of patients with certain types of blood cancer. The challenge now is how to make these treatments more effective and for more types of cancer.

“They’ve developed a technique in which they collect special ‘killer’ immune cells, called T cells, from a cancer patient. These are then ‘reprogrammed’ in the lab using a modified virus, which is very good at smuggling genes into the T cells.

In this case, the researchers added genes carrying instructions that tell the T cells to make a new protein called a “chimeric antigen receptor” – this lets them lock on to molecules found on the surface of cancer cells, killing them in the process.

These reprogrammed T cells are then injected back into the patient, where they grow and multiply, creating an army of killer cells to fight the disease.”

here is the link:
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2013/06/25/no-doctors-did-not-inject-hiv-into-a-dying-girl-to-treat-her-cancer/