Metastatic melanoma cells

What’s the News: Souped-up cells from a patient’s own immune system could one day be used to treat advanced melanoma, according to a preliminary study published in Science Translational Medicine investigating the safety of the technique. The researchers manipulated a patient’s immune system cells to better recognize cancer cells in the lab and then re-introduced those cells into the body—an approach called “adoptive T-cell therapy.”

How the Heck:

The researchers took T-cells, one of the main classes of cells the immune system uses to fight off disease, from nine patients with advanced melanoma.
Using genetically engineered cells that have some of the same antigens—the sorts of molecules that immune cells take as a signal to attack—that tumor cells do, the researchers in effect improved the T-cells’ memory for cancer cells.
They then multiplied the cells, so they’d be more numerous inside the body, and infused each patient with their own cells. This infusion of souped-up cancer-targeting cells boosts the immune system’s ability to combat the cancer.
Ten weeks later, seven of the patients had more of the specially trained T-cells than were originally re-introduced. Of the nine patients in total, the cancer stabilized in ...