ATLANTA — An Oregon man given less than a year to live had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors.
The 52-year-old patient’s dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers.
“Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach” to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research.
Still, the immune-priming experiments have yet to yield a consistent therapy.
Two years after his remarkable recovery, the patient fell out of contact with researchers, so they do not know his current condition. The man, who lives in a small town in Oregon, has declined media interviews.
Melanoma is a cancer in the skin cells that make pigments and cause skin to tan, as part of the body’s attempt to protect itself from ultraviolet radiation in sunlight.
About 62,000 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and there are about 8,000 melanoma deaths.
Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute and other researchers have focused on souping up a certain kind of immune system cell — the “killer T cells” that envelop and kill foreign agents. Researchers used specific helper T cells that are adept at locking onto a cancer cell and guiding the killer cells to their target.
