Dr. Zheng Cui of Wake Forest University School of Medicine has been given a green light to begin providing transfusions of immune system cells--called granulocytes--to cancer patients. And Dr. Cui says that his "exceptionally successful" preclinical experiments lead him to believe that this could prove to be a cure for cancer. "If this is half as effective in humans as it is in mice it could be that half of patients could be cured or at least given one to two years extra of high quality life," he told the Telegraph.
Highlighted in the current issue of New Scientist, Dr. Cui found that nearly 97 percent of the cancer cells exposed to certain donor immune cells were killed, while in other cases the kill ratio dropped to as low as two percent. Immune cells from patients over the age of 50 were weaker than others while stress and the time of year also appeared to factor into the efficacy rate. One potential threat to his experiment will be graft-vs-host disease.
- read the article from the Telegraph
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