Woman Cured Of Advanced Breast Cancer Using Own Immune Cells In ‘Exciting’ World First

Judy Perkins was 'cured' by doctors who turbo-charged her immune system

For the first time in world history, a woman with advanced stage breast cancer was “cured” thanks to an experimental new therapy.

Judy Perkins, a 52-year-old engineer and mother-of-two from Florida, was given three months to live after several rounds of chemotherapy failed to keep the cancer from spreading to the rest of her body.

“My condition deteriorated a lot towards the end, and I had a tumour pressing on a nerve, which meant I spent my time trying not to move at all to avoid pain shooting down my arm,” Perkins told The Guardian. “I had given up fighting.”

She was then enrolled at the US National Cancer Institute for a new kind of immunotherapy. The treatment used a process called adoptive cell transfer to remove one of the tumours from Perkins’s body and locate all the friendly T cells that were still able to recognise harmful cancer cells.

Once the T cells were identified, they were extracted and multiplied until the scientists had an army of 90 billion cancer-fighting cells which they were then able to inject back into Perkins.

Within weeks, Perkins literally felt her tumours shrinking; she even celebrated by going on a 40-mile hike – and now, two years after the treatment, she is still cancer-free.

“I was very skeptical about whether this treatment would work because I knew the odds were not really great. But within two weeks I could feel the tumours in my chest wall shrinking and I started to feel better,” Perkins told The Telegraph. “It feels miraculous and I am beyond amazed that I have now been free of cancer for two years.

“Experts may call it extended remission but I call it a cure,” she added.

The researchers in Maryland are currently working on launching full-scale clinical trails for the immunotherapy treatment to be used in other kinds of advanced cancer cases, including prostate and ovarian. Though they caution that the procedure has only been tested – and proved successful – in one woman, they say that it could be the start of a revolution in life-saving cancer treatments.

The results of this work were published in the journal Nature Medicine.





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