U.S. researchers report progress in leukemia treatment

WASHINGTON. KAZINFORM U.S. researchers on Wednesday reported "more encouraging news" about an experimental therapy against a deadly form of leukemia, called B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL).
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A clinical study involving 16 B-ALL patients found that 88 percent of them achieved "complete remissions" after being treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells, according to the research report published in the U.S. journal Science Translational Medicine,Xinhua reports. "These extraordinary results demonstrate that cell therapy is a powerful treatment for patients who have exhausted all conventional therapies," said Michel Sadelain of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and one of the study's senior authors. " Our initial findings have held up in a larger cohort of patients, and we are already looking at new clinical studies to advance this novel therapeutic approach in fighting cancer." B-ALL, a type of blood cancer that develops in B cells, is difficult to treat because the majority of patients relapse. Patients with relapsed B-ALL have few treatment options and only 30 percent respond to salvage chemotherapy. Without a successful bone marrow transplant, few have any hope of long-term survival. In the current study, 16 patients with relapsed B-ALL were given an infusion of their own genetically modified immune cells, called T cells, which were "reeducated" to recognize and destroy cancer cells that contain the protein CD19. Read more here

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