Monday, March 28, 2016
Doctors Inject Modified HIV Into Dying Girl to treat her cancer
Fighting Fire with fire
Professor Carl H. June and his team in Philadelphia, are developing and testing a new ways to turn the power of the immune system on leukemia ( a cancer caused by the white cells growing out of control.
Professor Carl H. June, a highly respected scientist working on cancer, HIV and the immune system and his team developed a technique in which they collect special ‘killer’ immune cells, called T cells, from a cancer patient. These are then ‘reprogrammed’ in the lab using a modified virus, which is very good at smuggling genes into the T cells.
In this case, the researchers added genes carrying instructions that tell the T cells to make a new protein called a “chimeric antigen receptor” – this lets them lock on to molecules found on the surface of cancer cells, killing them in the process.
These reprogrammed T cells are then injected back into the patient, where they grow and multiply, creating an army of killer cells to fight the disease.
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