The
first trial in the United States of a genetic editing tool called Crispr
against cancer seems to be going well in three patients so far, but it is too
early to know if it will improve their chances of survival, doctors said
Wednesday.
Doctors
took cells from the patients' immune system and genetically altered them to
instruct them to recognize and fight cancer, with minimal and manageable side
effects.
The
treatment eliminates three genes that could have been hampering the ability of
these cells to attack the disease, and adds a new and fourth characteristic to
boost them in the task.
"It
is the most complicated genetic and cellular engineering that has been
attempted so far", said study leader Dr. Edward Stadtmauer of the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "This is the proof that we can
safely make the genetic editing of these cells".
After
two or three months, one patient's cancer continued to worsen and another
remained stable. A third patient was treated too recently to know how it will
go. The plan is to treat 15 more patients with the treatment before assessing
its safety and proper functioning.
"It's
very early, but I feel incredibly encouraged by this", said an independent
expert, Dr. Aaron Gerds, a cancer specialist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Other
cell therapies for some blood cancers "have been a great success, since
they have taken diseases that are not curable and are healing them", and
genetic editing could be a way to remedy them, he said.
Genetic
editing is a way to permanently change DNA to attack the root causes of a
disease.
Crispr
is a tool to cut DNA at a specific point. It has been used for a long time in
laboratories and is being tested for other diseases.
Crispr
is the acronym in English for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic
Repeats, or Short Palindromic Repeats Grouped and Regularly Spaced.
SOURCE: Panorama
