Fact from research

Science Sees the Light

Alternative medicine practitioners have long held that with a little help, the human immune system possesses the power to heal itself of even the gravest conditions. Now, in its lab-based way, traditional science is reporting its own success on the immunotherapy front.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute have announced new progress in using a patient’s rebuilt immune system to treat melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer that afflicts more than 50,000 Americans each year.

Adoptive transfer, as the therapy is known, involves rebuilding a patient’s immune system with disease-fighting T cells extracted directly from the patient’s tumors. T cells are the body’s primary defense against foreign bacteria and infection. Having been exposed to the deadly tumors, the T cells are already programmed for the fight. Without reinforcements, however, they are apparently doomed to failure. And so in the Bethesda, Maryland labs, researchers cloned new cells from the originals.

Meanwhile, doctors used chemotherapy to destroy each patient’s immune system, which otherwise tends to reject adoptive transfer cells. Finally, the reinforced T cells were reintroduced in combination with the protein interleukin-2, which stimulates T cell growth.

By the end of the study, 6 of 13 patients whom chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and/or surgery had largely failed saw their malignant tumors shrink up to 50 percent. Researchers are unsure how long the benefits of the new therapy will hold—or if it will be effective with other forms of cancer—but after about four months, the shrunken tumors had yet to grow back. No one would deny this is a promising development, but alternative practitioners believe they can achieve similar results with less invasive, less grueling methods.

“We’ve had the same kind of success without destroying a patient’s immune system first,” says Arthur D. Alexander, vice president of the Livingston Foundation Medical Center in San Diego. The Livingston method includes a mainly organic diet, vitamin-rich nutritional supplements, specialized vaccines, detoxifying enemas, and psychotherapy.

For now, the traditional and alternative worlds remain divided. But hopefully they’ll converge in the future to offer cancer patients their best possible shot at recovery.

—James O’Brien