2023-12-26 06:26:00
Terminally ill patient recovers from cancer: here is the revolutionary experimental CAR-T therapy
Paulo Peregrino, a 61-year-old Brazilian, thought he had no chance of improving from the cancer he had been battling for years. In April, however, he decided to undergo a revolutionary new treatment.
As reported by the A24 news agency, the 61-year-old was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 and then non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma about ten years later. The man then agreed to receive CAR-T cell therapy, one of the most cutting-edge cancer treatments ever developed to date. Therapy provides for theremoval and the separation from the body of immune cells known as T lymphocytes, responsible for fighting pathogens and eliminating infected cells. After 30 days of treatment, the patient was discharged from the Hospital das Clínicas of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo, as Radioagência Nacional reported. THE doctors confirmed that the entire tumor has disappeared.
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An innovative therapy to cure cancer
CAR-T cell therapy was developed in the United States and began to be used on an experimental basis to treat terminal cancer patients in early 2010. Food and Drug Administration approval came in 2017. Although it proven effective, it is rather expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of euros per patient. Furthermore, at the moment it can only be used to treat certain types of cancer, such as lymphoma, leukemia and myeloma. The countries where the treatment is currently available are the United States, China, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Peregrino was one of the few Brazilians who underwent this treatment, due to limited availability in Brazil. He had, however, exhausted his lymphoma treatment options, undergoing 45 chemotherapy sessions over five years and a bone marrow transplant. “Nothing helped,” he told A24. Of the few Brazilian patients who underwent the therapy, 60% saw their cancer go into remission in just 30 days. “Now we have to follow the case. We know that after a certain time the disease can return. There is talk of a total cure of cancer only after five years. However, this is already very encouraging because there was no longer any type of therapy for him,” doctor and researcher Vanderson Rocha, who participated in the treatment, told A24.
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