Woman with Late-Stage Breast Cancer Has Life Saved by Groundbreaking Treatment
Everyone knows just how destructive cancer can be to people’s lives. Not only are the treatments brutal, but doctors are still trying to come up with successful treatment options for the many different types of cancer there are.
Even once a new treatment option is discovered, each case is so incredibly different that there is no guarantee that the treatment will work for each one.
Some people have even turned to more natural remedies in lieu of chemotherapy and radiation. One Wisconsin mom now eats a very intentional diet that she believes completely fought off her cancer cells.
Others have looked to experimental treatments in hope that they will work.
Such is the case for 52-year-old Judy Perkins. In 2003 Perkins had a mastectomy and got her lymph nodes removed.
Just 10 years later, another lump appeared. This time, though, her cancer was in stage four. “So, I entered the world of cancer patient. Serious cancer patient,” she said.
Perkins underwent the needed chemotherapy as well as hormonal treatments, but the cancer continued to spread. Within just two years of discovering the lump, cancer had spread to her chest and liver.
She said, “I came to realize that I was going to die, and that’s where my mind was. I felt bad for my family, but I was grateful for the life I had had.”
Just when it seemed like the treatments weren’t going to be enough, Perkins stumbled across Dr. Steven Rosenburg’s research. Dr. Rosenburg works with the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research and specializes in immunology.
Immunology is a type of treatment that takes the patient’s own immune system and magnifies its power to fight off cancerous cells.
“The body has hundreds of billions of lymphocytes and somewhere in the body of a cancer patient there are lymphocytes, we hypothesized, that could recognize what was different about the cancer.” Dr. Rosenburg said.
“It was that hypothesis, it was that dream, that led us to try to identify the actual cells that were attacking the cancer and use them to actually develop a cancer treatment.”
After years of many clinical trials, Dr. Rosenburg learned that a specific cell called a T-cell was effective in fighting off certain cancerous cell. That is, unless it was outnumbered.
He began to extract those cells from patients bodies and then multiply them into little cancer fighting armies that would then be infused back into the patient’s system.
When Perkins reached out to Dr. Rosenburg, this is exactly the treatment his team gave her.
It didn’t take long for her to see results. She said, “I think it had been maybe 10 days since I’d gotten the cells, and I could already feel that tumor starting to get soft. By then I was like, ‘Dang, this is really working.'”
Perkins is cancer free two and half years after her treatment with Dr. Rosenburg; he believes that the army of T-cells is still at work in her immune system.
Dr. Rosenburg said, “Circulating in her body are large numbers of cells we administered to her two and half years ago. This is just one treatment that’s necessary because the cells are alive. They’re part of Judy. They are Judy Perkins.”
To learn more about Dr. Rosenburg’s research with immunology, watch the video below.
While this type of immunotherapy is still in its early stages, it’s hard to ignore the amount of success for Perkins. Could this groundbreaking research shape the future of cancer treatments?
Dr. Rosenburg thinks it could. He said, “This research is experimental right now. But because this new approach to immunotherapy is dependent on mutations, not on cancer type, it is in a sense a blueprint we can use for the treatment of many types of cancer.”
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