Girl's own immune system engineered to fight leukemia

Cancer free thanks to a new Immunotherapy for Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: Emily's story.

9-year-old Emily Whitehead is the first girl to be cured, as of 2012, of a highly aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) via a novel form of immunotherapy against leukemias. The girl did not respond successfully to chemotherapy before she entered as the first patient of a new trial by study leader Stephan A. Grupp, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric oncologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. What the team did was to bioengineer T cells to work not against pathogens, viruses, bacteria etc. but to recognize and kill the leukemia cells that normally evade regular T cell surveillance. 

What is a T cell?
T-cells are a type of white blood cell that circulate around our bodies, scanning for cellular abnormalities and infections.

Adding a receptor on T-cells allow them to recognize the
target cell - in this case the cancer cell - and kill it.
Our immune system often struggles to recognize cancer cells
as foreign, because the cancer cell is actually very similar to
many other cells in our body. 

Researchers first extracted the patient's own T cells and added a receptor to them that specifically recognize an antigen, an antenna that specifically marked these cancer cells. Once the T cell receptor binds to the cancer cell antigen, the T cell is able to kill the cancer cell as effectively as our immune system kills many viruses and bacteria. This is a powerful method to utilize patient's own arsenal in their immune system against cancer. 

 This past July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration designated the so called CTL019 approach as a Breakthrough Therapy, helping to expedite its progress into broader clinical trials. While it's very early days, the future looks promising for such therapies. Source of the news can be found here.