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Published online 20 April 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.376
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Designer immune cells fight prostate cancer
'Living drug' shows promise in early clinical trials.
Genetically engineered immune cells may have helped two patients with advanced prostate cancer to fight the disease, preliminary results suggest.
Prostate cancer kills more than 28,000 men in the United States alone each year.
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This is interesting, as one who has been treated for Prostate cancer (The doc' says I'm in remission) I am aware that there are many different cancers of the prostate some of which are copius producers of PSA and others which produce little if any. However, a question. Is the PSMA protein present in ALL prostate cancers at levels sufficient to destroy the cell when attacked, irrespective of the PSA output? If it is, then we have a promising line of inquiry which needs following up urgently.
Although designer T cells may be an ingenious idea to treat prostrate cancer, a key drawback is that tumors are known to evolve mechanisms to evade attacks from the immune system. Perhaps a potential flaw in the designer T cell concept is that the prostrate tumor would most likely develop ways to evade T cell attacks. A good way to overcome this may be to re-engineer designer T cells to combat tumor evasion...