Word: rosenberger
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...milestone event should be quickly followed by a second application of human gene therapy, now apparently close to final approval. It has been proposed by NIH's Dr. Steven Rosenberg for treating patients with advanced cases of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer that afflicts 28,000 Americans annually. "We now use radiation, chemotherapy and surgery -- external forces -- on cancer patients," Rosenberg says. "But gene therapy uses the body's own internal mechanism. We're trying to make the body itself reject the disease...
...Rosenberg's strategy, devised with the help of Anderson, is to extract immune cells called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) from the tumors of melanoma patients. Rosenberg bathes the TILs in a solution of interleukin-2, a natural substance that invigorates them, and then exposes the TILs to re- engineered mouse leukemia retroviruses...
Like the retrovirus used by Anderson, Rosenberg's delivery system has been made harmless and endowed by recombinant DNA techniques with a human gene. But this gene codes for tumor necrosis factor, a naturally occurring compound that attacks cancer cells. The altered viruses insert themselves and their piggyback gene into the genetic material of the TILs, which are then injected back into the bloodstream of the melanoma patients. If everything goes as planned, the activated TILs will home in on the tumors like guided missiles, attacking the cancerous cells and at the same time releasing the antitumor factor to help...
...experiments rely on a technology that has evolved over the past 12 years. Each uses a virus to act as a kind of biological taxi to transport a desired gene into the nucleus of human blood cells. In one experiment, a team led by Dr. Steven Rosenberg proposes to treat malignant melanoma, a form of skin cancer, with blood cells that have been genetically altered to transform them into tiny factories for a tumor-killing protein...
Produced by Sydney Pollack and Mark Rosenberg...