Judy Perkins, a 52-year-old mother of two, was given months to live after seven types of chemotherapy failed and she had developed tumours the size of fists in her liver.
According to a number of media reports, Perkins, has been “cured” by an injection harvested from her own immune system in what scientists have described as an “extremely promising” world first.
She had undergone a mastectomy in 2003 after the cancer was first diagnosed, but it returned in 2013 and spread aggressively.
Ms Perkins, an engineer from Florida, has now been completely cancer free for two years and leads an active life including 40-mile hikes and kayaking.
Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said Perkins’s response had been “remarkable”: the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that she has now been free of the disease for two years.
The dramatic success has raised hopes that the therapy will work in more patients with advanced breast cancer and other difficult to treat cancers, such as ovarian and prostate. Researchers are now planning full scale clinical trials to assess how effective the treatment could be.
“We are now at the cusp of a major revolution in finally realising the elusive goal of being able to target the plethora of mutations in cancer through immunotherapy,” Radvanyi said.
But experts caution that the treatment has only proved itself in one woman and that the clinical trials are needed to see how effective the therapy could be in other cancer patients. Researchers point out that while the treatment could in principle work for many different kinds of cancer, it will not help everyone.
