Word: nci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ronald Reagan, shocked the nation last year by announcing on television, "The President has cancer." And it was Rosenberg who caused a flurry in December with the report that he had used a natural body chemical to stimulate cells from the immune system to destroy human tumors. Now the NCI researcher and his colleagues were announcing a new cancer-killing cell in the body that was "50 to 100 times" as effective in animal trials as the one they experimented with last year...
...things that work in mice that do not work in people." Still, some of the results published last week in the journal Science were compelling. For example, mice subjected to the new treatment proved to be immune to malignancies seeded by cells from the original tumor. And the NCI team has already isolated the same kind of powerful cancer-fighting cell in humans. "It's potentially very exciting," Rosenberg concedes. He believes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will agree and approve the treatment for human trials within the next two months...
...hormone-like substance interleukin-2 to turn certain white blood cells into cancer destroyers called lymphokine- activated killers. Reinjected into the bloodstream with more IL-2, LAK cells shrank or eliminated tumors in several patients. As news of the experiment spread, desperate cancer victims around the country besieged the NCI for LAK treatment. Able to take only a handful of patients, the institute is still turning away hundreds each week. Nearly overlooked in the news reports was Rosenberg's warning of IL-2's side effects, which include internal bleeding and retention of fluid in the tissues. Indeed, the large...
...cancer cells were dying out. After 15 days, the researchers injected millions of TIL cells back into the mice. The cells, as if by instinct, sought out the tumors that had spread from the original cancer and attacked them. To keep the TIL cells vigorous and growing, the NCI team had to inject the mice with additional IL-2, but only about a tenth as much as in the LAK treatments. As a result, few serious side effects were apparent. With the addition of cyclophosphamide, a drug that Rosenberg believes suppresses immune-system cells that might otherwise impede...
Other experts seemed equally impressed. After hearing of the NCI report, Allan Hess, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, summed up the mood of cancer specialists. "We're really beginning to understand what goes on in cancer," he said. "Now we're taking that knowledge and applying...