Immune System

A radical new therapy that destroys a person's immune system, then "rescues" it with a bone-marrow transplant, is saving the lives of dozens of cancer patients who would otherwise be condemned to death. The "kill and rescue" therapy being used at Hahnemann University Hospital is so effective - yet so potentially life-threatening - that the hospital is building a $2.5 million bone-marrow transplant center, which will be sealed airtight and sterilized against the common germs and microbes of the world outside.

The seventh child to receive an experimental leukemia therapy at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia got good news last week: It worked. "Avrey Walker is cancer free!!!! A total remission!" her father, Aaron, exulted on their Facebook page. The 9-year-old from Redmond, Ore., was diagnosed at age 4 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a blood cancer that can be deadly within a few months if not treated. Like other children in the study at Children's, Avrey had undergone years of intermittent chemotherapy, only to relapse each time the toxic treatments ended.

One of the hot topics in cancer medicine is using tiny particles to deliver drugs directly to a tumor, rather than bombarding the whole body with chemotherapy. But the immune system treats these nanoparticles as foreign invaders, so it tries to clear them before they do their job. The solution, says a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, is to make the foreign particles seem like natives. The group reported Thursday they had done just that in lab mice, attaching customized protein fragments to the particles that tricked the animals' immune-system "border guards" into relaxing their vigilance.

A Lancaster County heart-transplant recipient has become the first of 15 patients to receive a revolutionary therapy designed to prevent his body from rejecting the organ. The technique involved replacing part of his immune system with that of his donor. The technique is controversial and as yet unproven. David Combs, 53, of Kirkwood, is doing well after the heart transplant on Sunday, said his doctors at Allegheny University Hospitals/Hahnemann. Combs, a longtime coronary artery disease patient, received the immune-system transplant yesterday.

Uncovering a new connection between body and mind, a Canadian study has shown that just looking at pictures of sick people can rev up the human immune system. The researchers, from the University of British Columbia, treated a group of volunteers to a 10-minute slide show of sniffling, congested, pox-riddled people or close-ups of infected sores. Then they measured an immune protein called interleukin-6 in their blood, a standard test that can approximate immune response. They published their results in last week's issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Eastman Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Co., has paid Immunex Corp. of Seattle slightly more than $3 million for rights to market a genetically engineered protein, interleukin-4 (IL-4). Interleukins are members of a class of naturally occurring proteins, the lymphokines, which play a vital role in the regulation of the body's immune system. Immunologists consider lymphokines to be chemical messengers that signal various components of the immune system to spring into action when foreign matter invades the body.

Susumu Tonegawa learned that he had won the Nobel prize for medicine yesterday morning when a Japanese reporter called him about 6:30 a.m. at his home in Newton, Mass. Tonegawa was "very surprised" and a bit skeptical because he had not heard formally from the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. He thought "this could be all made up by the media," he told reporters later yesterday, after he knew that he had indeed won the prize. Tonegawa, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was upstaged at his news conference by his 9-month-old son, Hidde, his only child, who laughed, yelled and mugged for the television cameras.

One of the hot trends in cancer medicine is using tiny particles to deliver drugs directly to a tumor, rather than bombarding the whole body with chemotherapy. But the immune system treats these nanoparticles as foreign invaders, so it tries to clear them before they can do their job. The solution, says a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, is to make the foreign particles seem like natives. The group reported Thursday it had done just that in lab mice, attaching customized protein fragments to the particles that tricked the animals' immune-system "border guards" into relaxing their vigilance.

An intruder is inside your body. Maybe it's a parasite from dirty drinking water. A virus from a coworker's sneeze. Or a bacterium that sneaked in when you cut your finger. Luckily for you, the immune system determines just which one of its many weapons will best repel the intruder, and what's more, it "remembers" how to do the job even better, and faster, next time. This phenomenon of immune memory has been recognized since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, yet no one could figure out how it worked.

A Willingboro doctor known for his work on disease prevention and minority health is launching a program aimed at bolstering the immune systems of HIV patients through holistic health measures. Vernon R. Daly is a former vascular surgeon from Brooklyn who founded the Heureka Center for Disease Prevention & Health Promotion in 1991 after he moved to South Jersey. Inspired by his belief that minorities are underserved by the medical community, Daly's Heureka center has sought to reach out, sponsoring minority health fairs.

The seventh child to receive an experimental leukemia therapy at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia got good news last week: It worked. "Avrey Walker is cancer free!!!! A total remission!" her father, Aaron, exulted on their Facebook page. The 9-year-old from Redmond, Ore., was diagnosed at age 4 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a blood cancer that can be deadly within a few months if not treated. Like other children in the study at Children's, Avrey had undergone years of intermittent chemotherapy, only to relapse each time the toxic treatments ended.

University of Pennsylvania researcher Carl H. June has been selected to receive the 2012 Philadelphia Award for "his extraordinary advancements in gene therapy aimed at treating HIV and cancer. " June and his team recentlyreported that of the first 12 patients treated with the experimental therapy, nine - including two children - had complete or partial remissions from advanced, intractable leukemia. Two adults remain cancer-free two and a half years after treatment. The annual award, which carries a $25,000 honorarium, was created by Ladies Home Journal Editor Edward Bok in 1921 to honor a local person whose work advanced "the best and largest interest" of the greater Philadelphia community.

One of the hot trends in cancer medicine is using tiny particles to deliver drugs directly to a tumor, rather than bombarding the whole body with chemotherapy. But the immune system treats these nanoparticles as foreign invaders, so it tries to clear them before they can do their job. The solution, says a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, is to make the foreign particles seem like natives. The group reported Thursday it had done just that in lab mice, attaching customized protein fragments to the particles that tricked the animals' immune-system "border guards" into relaxing their vigilance.

One of the hot topics in cancer medicine is using tiny particles to deliver drugs directly to a tumor, rather than bombarding the whole body with chemotherapy. But the immune system treats these nanoparticles as foreign invaders, so it tries to clear them before they do their job. The solution, says a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, is to make the foreign particles seem like natives. The group reported Thursday they had done just that in lab mice, attaching customized protein fragments to the particles that tricked the animals' immune-system "border guards" into relaxing their vigilance.

Two months ago, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia made international headlines for using an experimental gene therapy to save the life of a Pennsylvania girl who was dying of leukemia. On Wednesday, the hospital made international headlines - and was denounced on Facebook as "cruel" and "heartless," as being "greedy monsters" and worse - for appearing to tack on hundreds of thousands of dollars to the original price of treating a Croatian child, Nora Situm, 5, with the same breakthrough therapy.

Two months ago, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia made international headlines for using an experimental gene therapy to save the life of a Pennsylvania girl who was dying of leukemia. On Wednesday, the hospital made international headlines - and was denounced on Facebook as "cruel" "heartless," "greedy monsters" and worse - for appearing to tack on hundreds of thousands of dollars to the original price of treating a Croatian child, Nora Situm, 5, with the same breakthrough therapy.

Question: I was reading a story in the newspaper that the British Medical Journal has accused Roche Pharmaceuticals of failing to provide full access to the research data on Tamiflu. The article said there's really no evidence that Tamiflu can actually stop the flu. Do you agree? Do you recommend that people still take it if they have the flu? Answer: Even if the antiviral treatment for flu works as stated, it only reduces the duration of symptoms in adults (18 to 65) by an average of 1.3 days; by just one day in folks over 65; and by roughly 36 hours in children.

In a sign of how far the science of cancer genomics has come, the University of Pennsylvania Health System will do genetic tests later this year on cancer cells of all patients with several types of cancer. Penn will test up to 48 genes in patients with melanoma, acute myelogenous leukemia, and brain and lung cancer, said Chi V. Dang, director of the Abramson Cancer Center. The results will reveal which patients could benefit from new drugs that work only for those with certain mutations.

RESEARCHERS have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV. The patients' immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs, as healthy people do. What triggers this isn't known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious. This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn't spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

An existing drug dramatically reduced the most serious complications of bone marrow transplants, University of Pennsylvania researchers are reporting Thursday. The finding could someday point the way toward an entirely new method of preventing the body from "rejecting" transplanted organs of all kinds in the future, experts said. The work demonstrates a possible new approach to transplants of donated bone marrow, said Joseph Antin, a professor of medicine at Harvard, who was not involved with the study.