THE blood of a brother or sister might help people fight cancer.
Some cancer patients are given bone marrow transplants from a sibling to compensate for the effects of chemotherapy, and doctors have long suspected that immune cells from the donor attack the cancer more vigorously than the patient鈥檚 own. Now Michael Bishop鈥檚 team at the National Cancer Institute鈥檚 Center for Cancer Research in Bethesda, Maryland, has proved it.
They injected T-cells extracted from the blood of immuno-compatible siblings into 15 women with breast cancer, several weeks after they had finished chemotherapy. The tumours shrank in about half of the women 鈥� by more then 50 per cent in four of them.
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Reporting his team鈥檚 findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, Bishop suggested that the same approach might help treat other solid cancers. But further trials are necessary to prove that the treatment actually prolongs life, and Bishop stresses that it will at best only complement mainstream therapies.
The advantage of the treatment is that it would face fewer safety hurdles than most new therapies, because sibling-to-sibling transfusions are already commonplace. 鈥淚t would be OK just to take blood from a brother or sister,鈥� Bishop says. 鈥淎bout 1 in 3 are matched.鈥� It might also be possible to make the treatment more effective by selecting T-cells that attack a specific cancer.