This Revolutionary Treatment Kills Cancer From the Inside Out

we got word that yes they did see a large mass in my abdomen learned that it was in fact large b-cell lymphoma they didn't really help encourage me here that it's a very small percentage of people that gets this kind of cancer that you've got but it does make you ask questions like why me my wife and I and our church had been praying for me through this situation we again prayed well life could either be over very very soon for me or perhaps God would lead us to a place that could have some treatment that would be successful we had three effective ways to treat cancer over the last hundred years and that is surgery radiation therapy and chemotherapy despite the best application of these three common modalities people in America that died of cancer number about five hundred and eighty thousand every year we desperately therefore need additional ways to treat cancer and have been developing immunotherapy as a fourth modality to join surgery radiation and chemotherapy this is dr. Steve Rosenberg he's a cancer surgeon and he's had about the most prestigious career a surgeon can have but if you ask Steve Rosenberg what his life's work is he wouldn't say surgery for the past 40 years he's been working on a new way of treating cancer that can make techniques like surgery obsolete immunotherapy doesn't use a scalpel a radiation beam or a drug external forces on the body rather it attempts to modify the immune system to fight the cancer the body's own natural defenses that protect the body against foreign invaders well the body recognizes most cancers as foreign but with not a strong enough reaction to eliminate those cancers and the goal of immunotherapy is to stimulate immune responses to cause those cancers to disappear when I began working there was certainly no effective immunotherapies at all the first immunotherapy ever developed was the administration of interleukin 2 which I started in 1976 well we treated 66 patients over the course of many years trying to find the best ways to stimulate the body's immune system none of those treatments work 66 consecutive patients died until the 67th patient a woman named Linda who I can use her name because she's been in newspapers around the country Linda is now alive 30 years later she had widespread melanoma and all disappeared and she was only the first of many patients now shown to respond to immunotherapy interleukin 2 was only effective for a small fraction of patients but it proved dr. Rosenberg's idea could work he and his team have spent the last 30 years trying to improve the treatment recently they've had a breakthrough thanks to advances in genetic engineering essentially they can take your own immune cells and reprogram them to attack cancer we can isolate the lymphocytes from the blood the immune Warriors of the body and then introduce new genes into the lymphocytes to give them a property that will recognize and destroy the cancer we then go on and expand themselves to large numbers and administer them to patients dr. Rosenberg is now testing this approach on patients who fail to respond to any other forms of treatment so mr. Oaks came to us having been through multiple chemotherapy regimens that had not had not helped him and he came to us with a large grapefruit-sized mass in his abdomen and you can see it on this cat scan right here they finally said the chemo isn't working for you you're not responding well to it so there's nothing more we can do for you however there is some new experimental programs that are being conducted at National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland and we're going to try to get you in to those they took a little bit of my blood and did a little work on in our laboratory for about five days put it back in and let it go to work attacking the cancer the treatment is pretty pretty simple and about a month it's it's done nice to see you walking Hey I mean when we came back for our first checkup is really the first indication of how well the treatment worked they said we see no active cancer and my wife and I just grabbed each other's hands and said thank you God and thank you dr. Rosenberg it's great relief hello sir delighted to see you again a little greasy here oh yeah very clean mojito that's good so that large mass that you had in the belly we see it continuing to shrink it's down to about that big now but it's dead as best we can tell the tumor is completely has to completely responded so we're thrilled for you're thrilled also we've learned a lot from you that I think are going to help a lot of other people as well it's a very new kind of approach as you know we genetically manipulate the immune system but in this situation seems to be working working well any questions you have for me well not right now if you don't mind I'll forget I had cancer for about three more months the idea later back another trip that's what we like so nice to mix over every day stay in touch good thank you all right dr. Rosenberg has had huge success with this latest version of his treatment it's caused regression in more than 70% of lymphoma patients in his clinical trials it's an exciting moment for the field of immunotherapy that dr. Rosenberg pioneered and it's taken him over 40 years of single-minded pursuit to get to this point but he's the first to point out that any talk of a cure is still a long way off the problem is that it doesn't always work and especially when it comes to solid tumors it works much less well than it does in patients with these blood cell tumors lymphomas so we're working around the clock now to apply these kinds of approaches to patients with the common solid cancers such as those of the colon and the pancreas and the ovary and the prostate until we can apply effective treatments to all innocent people who develop cancer there is plenty of work to be done

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 719,915

Rating: 4.9160323 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, immunotherapy, cancer, cancer treatment, Steve Rosenberg, cancer care, cancer cure, gene-editing, technology, innovation, medical research

Id: _Au5plbXm3Y

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2016