A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours.
It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.
The 49-year-old woman was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas.
Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said woman’s response had been “remarkable”: the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that the patient has now been free of the disease for two years.
