WORLD
Surprising Trial Results Raise Hopes for Cancer Breakthrough
Baku, August 19 (AZERTAC). Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania announced Wednesday that they have discovered a possibly “huge” breakthrough in the fight against cancer.
In two medical journals, the scientists revealed that a new treatment targeting a patient`s white blood cells, which are part of the body`s immune system, shows signs of early promise in combating leukemia.
The researchers engineered a virus that infected a patient`s T-cells, a type of white blood cell, and carried instructions to bind to cancer cells and ultimately kill them. Three patients have undergone the trial so far, and each infected T-cell killed about 1,000 cancer cells in each patient, according to the scientists` findings.
Two of the patients in the trial underwent a full recovery, at least for now, and one patient showed significant improvement. The scientists cautioned that the full effectiveness of the treatment could only be known once it is administered to a larger pool of patients but nevertheless hailed the results as a potentially major breakthrough.