Scientists Are Close To Curing Cancer, Terminal Patients In Remission

The cure for cancer has been one of the highest priorities of the medical world for decades, with scientists in both private and public fields trying their best to finally rid the world of the deadly disease. One group is closing in on a cure after publishing a paper indicating that they were able to reverse the conditions of terminally ill patients.

It’s well-known within the cancer community that the best way to head off cancer with current treatments is early diagnosis and an aggressive few rounds of chemotherapy, among other treatments. Once a patient reaches stage 4, their chances of survival diminish considerably. The US-based pharmaceutical company Kite Pharma is working on changing that and is making considerable headway.

The work that the company’s researchers were doing involve gene therapy and the trials yielded results that included terminally-ill patients going into remission after they were treated to just one round of trials. The trial itself lasted six months, with numerous subjects injected with modified T-cells.

For those who don’t know, T-cells are basically immune cells that are meant to destroy harmful invaders in the body. The genius of cancer cells is their ability to evade T-cells, which allows them to spread all over the body and multiply.

By genetically engineering these immune cells in order to make them more effective patrollers, they become better equipped to identify and eliminate cancer cells, Futurism reports. As a result, even patients who are at an advanced stage of the disease have a chance of cleansing their body of the illness.

As for the patients involved in the trials, they were divided based on which of the three types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma they had. Due to how advanced the stage of the cancer was in their bodies, most of the subjects were only given a few months to live. After the trials, many were given a second chance at life.