Immunotherapy targets NHL
Four of 38 patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma have seen "complete regressions" following immunotherapy treatment, while five others saw reductions of 50 per cent in their tumours.
The drug works by activating the body's own defences to attack the cancer.
The results have been described as an "exciting" and "significant" development in the use of immunotherapy, the process of using the body's own immune system to fight disease.
Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "These exciting preliminary results come from using them to harness the body's own immune response in a new way. Although the side effects need to be monitored carefully, we hope that this type of treatment will prove to be active in larger trials in the future"
"This a significant study," said Dr Cassian Yee, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, who has had significant results using the alternative method of treating patients with white blood cells grown in the lab. "It remains to be seen if most of the responses are longlasting. Certainly the results are very promising."
The drug, which has been developed by Micromet, in Bethesda, Maryland, was trialled by a team led by Dr Ralf Bargou at University of Würzburg in Würzburg, German.
The results, published in the journal Science, are encouraging because they suggest that the bigger the dose, the bigger the effect.
Coauthor of the study Dr Patrick Baeuerle, of Micromet, said all seven who received the highest dose responded to the drug.
"Two of the seven had a complete response, and five a partial regression (greater than 50 per cent reduction of tumour)."
The longest duration of a response was so far seen in a patient who received one quarter of their dose. After 13 months, he remains free of the blood cancer.
There are adverse side effects involved, however, such as fevers and chills, occasionally with confusion and tremor, though all stopped after treatment ceased.
Now a further trial is investigating how the drug works in patients with another form of blood cancer, called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Micromet targets the body's own white blood cells on the cancer, using a fraction of a millionth of a gram of a specialised protein called a "bispecific antibody".
The company has created antibodies, called BiTE antibodies, which are able to stick to sites with exquisite precision, in this case to activate specialized white blood cells (T cells) to attack cancer.
The antibodies overcome a key problem with immunotherapy that as tumours become more advanced they become more "invisible" to the T cells because the cancer cells lack molecules for white blood cells to hang on to and stage their attack.
Normal antibodies are designed to latch on to one molecular target but the bispecific antibody developed by Micromet, given the name blinatumomab, binds to two, the cancer cell and the T cell, and bring the two together to target the immune system on the cancer.
The team tried varying doses of blinatumomab in patients, and found that among 38 patients, at doses from 0.0005 to 0.06 milligrams (millionths of a gram) per square metre of body surface per day, 11 of them exhibited major responses and tumour shrinking. The disease was cleared from bone marrow, spleen and liver too.
The drug works by activating the body's own defences to attack the cancer.
The results have been described as an "exciting" and "significant" development in the use of immunotherapy, the process of using the body's own immune system to fight disease.
Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "These exciting preliminary results come from using them to harness the body's own immune response in a new way. Although the side effects need to be monitored carefully, we hope that this type of treatment will prove to be active in larger trials in the future"
"This a significant study," said Dr Cassian Yee, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, who has had significant results using the alternative method of treating patients with white blood cells grown in the lab. "It remains to be seen if most of the responses are longlasting. Certainly the results are very promising."
The drug, which has been developed by Micromet, in Bethesda, Maryland, was trialled by a team led by Dr Ralf Bargou at University of Würzburg in Würzburg, German.
The results, published in the journal Science, are encouraging because they suggest that the bigger the dose, the bigger the effect.
Coauthor of the study Dr Patrick Baeuerle, of Micromet, said all seven who received the highest dose responded to the drug.
"Two of the seven had a complete response, and five a partial regression (greater than 50 per cent reduction of tumour)."
The longest duration of a response was so far seen in a patient who received one quarter of their dose. After 13 months, he remains free of the blood cancer.
There are adverse side effects involved, however, such as fevers and chills, occasionally with confusion and tremor, though all stopped after treatment ceased.
Now a further trial is investigating how the drug works in patients with another form of blood cancer, called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Micromet targets the body's own white blood cells on the cancer, using a fraction of a millionth of a gram of a specialised protein called a "bispecific antibody".
The company has created antibodies, called BiTE antibodies, which are able to stick to sites with exquisite precision, in this case to activate specialized white blood cells (T cells) to attack cancer.
The antibodies overcome a key problem with immunotherapy that as tumours become more advanced they become more "invisible" to the T cells because the cancer cells lack molecules for white blood cells to hang on to and stage their attack.
Normal antibodies are designed to latch on to one molecular target but the bispecific antibody developed by Micromet, given the name blinatumomab, binds to two, the cancer cell and the T cell, and bring the two together to target the immune system on the cancer.
The team tried varying doses of blinatumomab in patients, and found that among 38 patients, at doses from 0.0005 to 0.06 milligrams (millionths of a gram) per square metre of body surface per day, 11 of them exhibited major responses and tumour shrinking. The disease was cleared from bone marrow, spleen and liver too.
posted by gwg at 3:34 PM
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