I got this in one of my "medical" pop ups....
From the Scotland Sunday Times
SCOTTISH scientists have saved the life of an eight-year-old girl using a technique that brings new hope to thousands of cancer sufferers.
Doctors involved in the pioneering treatment are hailing the technique as a major breakthrough in the treatment of lymphoma and other cancers caused by viruses.
Alex Lowe had lapsed into a coma and was given just days to live after aggressive chemotherapy failed to cure brain tumours caused by a virus. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, doctors turned to the experimental treatment developed by scientists at Edinburgh University. The technique uses a weekly transfusion of specially selected white blood cells — called killer T-cells — to target a specific cancer-causing virus.
Dr Robert Wynn, a consultant haematologist at the Royal Manchester children’s hospital, where the schoolgirl was treated, said: “She was essentially dead. She was in a coma, her body showed signs that she was close to death with the tumour. We were expecting a respiratory arrest from which we would not have attempted to resuscitate her.
“It is not too much to describe what happened as miraculous. She woke up and over the following months has returned to being a normal girl. She is back at school. She rides her bike. She can run. I have done lots of things in medicine but I have never seen anything like this girl.”
Alex’s mother, Lindsay, 33, added: “It is absolutely remarkable. I was sat at her bedside waiting for her to die. Then they came along and gave her an infusion. Between the second and third week everything was a lot better.”
A few months later doctors carried out a brain scan and found no sign of the tumours.
“It had all gone,” she said. “The doctors could not believe what they were telling me. She is a walking miracle.”
Alex, who lives near Wigan, suffered from an immune deficiency which meant her body was unable to defend her from the normally harmless Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
Before Alex’s dramatic recovery, the treatment had only been used in patients who developed cancers after organ transplants. Transplant patients are at higher risk of developing cancer because their immune systems is weakened by drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the new organs.
Its success in treating brain tumours caused by a virus has raised the prospect of the technique being adapted to attack other cancers — such as those suffered by patients with Aids — and related conditions such as Hodgkin’s disease.
The method, which is less toxic than chemotherapy, could also be used to treat other virus-related tumours such as cancer of the cervix or liver.
Alex’s treatment, which took place two years ago, has so astounded doctors that it has been reported in the current edition of the medical journal Lancet Oncology. A further 10 patients have received cell transfusions since she was treated.
The white blood cells are chosen to attack a specific virus and are grown in huge numbers in culture to establish a bank of 100 different cell lines that are compatible with common tissue types. They are stored in a unique T-cell bank at Edinburgh University.
“What is significant to us is that Alex was not a transplant patient, so it extends the usefulness of our treatment,” said Dorothy Crawford, professor of medical microbiology at Edinburgh University, who runs the T-cell bank. “We were delighted. It was such a dramatic treatment. If we show it works with this virus then maybe we can grow another bank for another virus. This is just the beginning.”
Alex went on to have a bone-marrow transplant that corrected her immune deficiency. A tumour that grew after the transplant was also successfully treated with T-cell therapy. She may now even donate bone marrow to her brother Cory, 5, who has the same condition.
Recalling her illness, Alex said: “I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t talk and I had to go in a wheelchair because I had been in a bed that long. If they hadn’t found the treatment for me I might have gone up in heaven.”
Henry Scowcroft, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, which has funded the therapy, said: “It’s always great to see the results of the research we fund pay off in such a spectacular way, especially in a patient so young. Therapies like this one, which are highly specific but available ‘off- the-shelf’ so that they can be delivered to the patient quickly, have long been a goal of the cancer research community.”
