New treatment hope for cancer

By Jayne Warren - 16/07/2008

Most of us, or someone we love, have been affected by cancer. Sometimes the drugs have worked. Sometimes they seem to cause as much suffering as the cancer itself. So the latest news about a man “cured” of melanoma using the patient’s own cells cloned outside his body made us want to investigate further. Can this approach really work - or is yet another false trail?

The man treated had advanced melanoma with secondaries in the lungs and lymph nodes. Scientists took a sample of his white blood cells, and selected CD4+T cells which were specifically primed to attack a chemical found on the surface of melanoma cells. Some five billion copies were made - and then put back into his body to see whether they would attack the tumour. They did. Two months later the tumours had gone ... and after two years the man involved was still cancer-free.

Too good to be true? According to neuroscientist Dr David Servan-Schreiber the body’s own immune system is a powerful but neglected tool that can be used to defeat cancer. His experience is personal - as well as professional. He discovered a tumour the size of a walnut lodged in his own brain at the age of 31 and this led him to explore the body’s immune system and inspired his book “Anticancer: A New Way of Life”.

In his words, “The body’s resources and its potential for dealing with disease are still too often underestimated by modern science. All of us have cancer cells in our bodies - but not all of us will develop it. Cancer is a fascinating and perverse phenomenon. The cells act like armed bandits, they lose the obligation to die after a certain number of divisions, and effectively become ‘immortal’. But there are certain circumstances under which these savage bands are disrupted and lose their virulence - and one of them is when the body’s own immune system mobilises against them.”

Servan-Schreiber - who has now kept cancer at bay for seven years - also emphasises the necessity for other practical considerations when harnessing the immune system’s own power, such as nutrition, environmental toxins, physical activity, love and support.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the vaccine project that has sparked the new debate, while buoyed by the results to date, is still cautious about what the technique might achieve. He says: “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of this therapy in a larger study. It may work for only a small percentage of people with advanced skin cancer.” Cancer Research UK agrees that more research is needed, but adds: “The principle that someone’s own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging for the work that we and others are carrying out in this field.”

Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer expert at Imperial College in London, said the researchers had focused on melanoma because the disease was well understood compared with other cancers, adding: “I think we will be able to harness the power of the immune system.”

So guarded optimism all round. The principle seems sound, but much more research needs to be done before the technique becomes a preferred or recommended treatment.

Another advocate of treatment harnessing and boosting the body’s own immune system is Dr Julian Kenyon (left), a surgeon by training who is the founding president of the British Society for Integrated Medicine and who now focusses all his energies on chronic and terminal illnesses at The Dove Clinic based in London and Winchester - and he already refers patients for dendritic cell vaccine treatment (dendritic cells are the immune cells found in one’s own body).

 

On the Dove Clinic’s website, there is the caveat that: “We do not claim that any of our treatments, investigative procedures or blood tests are cancer cures” but he told us that “I have personally supervised cancer vaccines and I’ve never seen a negative effect. In my personal experience, these vaccines currently work better on a minimal tumour load. If the tumour is solid, it is best to remove it as much as possible, and then apply  the vaccine.

“And when you inject someone it needs to produce a reaction - a bit of ‘angry’ redness on the skin just like a flu-jab. This means that the immune system is being switched on. The underlying principles behind vaccines are solid, and if they work, they work on the primary cancer as well as secondaries.

Dr Kenyon confirmed that treatment by vaccine is available in the UK under specific clinical trial protocol - and is half the annual cost of the drug herceptin. So why is it not more widespread? “As with all new treatments, the evidence-base has to be sufficiently strong, and at the moment our trials are usually on what we call ‘end-stage cases’. In other words, those who in many instances have asked for a vaccine as a last resort, so the results are biased from the start.”

However, excellent research documents on the benefits of cancer vaccines were published in September 2007 in a journal called “Vaccine” - and that research is available on the Dove Clinic website, listed below.

“The real problem is that these vaccines are not  ‘bespoke’ so they are difficult to patent, of course,” said Dr Kenyon. “But I cannot emphasise enough how much good evidence there is for this treatment, and I hope that knowledge of it will bring hope for the millions whose lives are affected by cancer all over the world.”

So it seems that, in some respects, the cure for cancer may lie within us. The Dove Clinic is at 19 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 8GE, Tel: 020 7580 8886. or click the link below. Fees may be reimbursed by your health insurance, or you may be able to go to the Dove Clinic as a NHS patient, depending on your GP and PCT.