Posted: Jun 09, 2018 4:05 am
Alan B wrote:Brilliant! Good news!
Now maybe there can be some similar Good News for prostate cancer which (it has recently been revealed) kills more men than breast cancer kills women...
I had a friend send me a copy of the study, which answers the reason why they can't do it on prostate cancer yet.
Firstly, according the this NCBI study Somatic Mutations in Prostate Cancer: Closer to Personalized Medicine
The molecular cause of prostate cancer (PCa) is still unclear
So, because the cause of prostate cancer is still unclear, they wouldn't know what kind of T cell receptors, that would target the cancer, to create.
But because the cause of the terminal breast cancer the women had is known, they were able to create the appropriate T cells. The type of breast cancer she had was :
estrogen receptor (ER)-positive and ERB-B2 receptor tyrosine kinase 2 (ERBB2; also known as HER2)-negative metastatic breast cancer
It is only because they knew exactly the type of cancer she had that they were able to create the appropriate T cells for it. Also, according to the study, the type of cancer she had didn't mutate very much, but if the cancer was the type of cancer that mutated too much the T cells probably wouldn't have been able to kill all of the cancer.