Jun 10, 2016 12:35 AM
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots...ght-cancer
Quote:It's a new modality for treating cancer," says Dr. Samuel Broder, a former director of the National Cancer Institute, says now of Allison's pioneering research. "It used to be there were three basic treatment options for cancer — surgery, radiation and chemotherapy — or some combination of those three. It's fair to say there's now a fourth option."
Allison's long search for this new kind of treatment — one that's since become a lifesaver for some cancer patients — began around a decade before Belvin got sick, when Allison was running a lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
At the time, he was what you could call a research scientist's research scientist. He was fascinated by certain powerful cells of the immune system — T cells. A subset of white blood cells, T cells travel around the body and can "protect us against just about anything," Allison says.
T cells do recognize cancer cells, but not in a way that can eliminate the disease. Allison had been studying T cells for years, and thought that by tinkering with one key molecule on the outside of these cells, he could enhance their response to cancer, enough to eradicate the illness.
He and one of his grad students ran an experiment to test the tweaked T cells on cancerous tumors in mice, and the initial results astounded them. The T cells seemed to be doing just what Allison had hoped they would do — shrink the tumors and kill the cancer.