It certainly is for Judy Perkins, a lady from Florida, who is the subject of a research paper published last week in the journal Nature Medicine by Nikolaos Zacharakis, Steven Rosenberg and their colleagues at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Having reached a point where she was enduring pain and facing death from metastatic breast cancer, the paper notes that she has undergone “complete durable regression … now ongoing for over 22 months.” Wow! Hard to even begin to imagine how she must feel — or, for that matter, the team that engineered this outcome.
How was it done?
Well, it’s a very good example of what I do tend to go on about in these pages — namely that science is almost never about ‘ground-breaking breakthroughs’ or ‘Eureka’ moments. It creeps along in tiny steps, sideways, backwards and sometimes even forwards.
You may recall that in Self Help – Part 2, talking about ‘personalized medicine’, we described how in one version of cancer immunotherapy a sample of a patient’s white blood cells (T lymphocytes) is grown in the lab. This is a way of either getting more immune cells that can target the patient’s tumour or of being able to modify the cells by genetic engineering. One approach is to engineer cells to make receptors on their surface that target them to the tumour cell surface. Put these cells back into the patient and, with luck, you get better tumour cell killing.
An extra step (Gosh! Wonderful GOSH) enabled novel genes to be engineered into the white cells.
The Shape of Things to Come? took a further small step when DNA sequencing was used to identify mutations that gave rise to new proteins in tumour cells (called tumour-associated antigens or ‘neoantigens’ — molecular flags on the cell surface that can provoke an immune response – i.e., the host makes antibody proteins that react with (stick to) the antigens). Charlie Swanton and his colleagues from University College London and Cancer Research UK used this method for two samples of lung cancer, growing them in the lab to expand the population and testing how good these tumour-infiltrating cells were at recognizing the abnormal proteins (neo-antigens) on cancer cells.
Now Zacharakis & Friends followed this lead: they sequenced DNA from the tumour tissue to pinpoint the main mutations and screened the immune cells they’d grown in the lab to find which sub-populations were best at attacking the tumour cells. Expand those cells, infuse into the patient and keep your fingers crossed.
Adoptive cell transfer. This is the scheme from Self Help – Part 2 with the extra step (A) of sequencing the breast tumour. Four mutant proteins were found and tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes reactive against these mutant versions were identified, expanded in culture and infused into the patient.
What’s next?
The last step with the fingers was important because there’s almost always an element of luck in these things. For example, a patient may not make enough T lymphocytes to obtain an effective inoculum. But, regardless of the limitations, it’s what scientists call ‘proof-of-principle’. If it works once it’ll work again. It’s just a matter of slogging away at the fine details.
For Judy Perkins, of course, it’s about getting on with a life she’d prepared to leave — and perhaps, once in while, glancing in awe at a Nature Medicine paper that does not mention her by name but secures her own little niche in the history of cancer therapy.
References
McGranahan et al. (2016). Clonal neoantigens elicit T cell immunoreactivity and sensitivity to immune checkpoint blockade. Science 10.1126/science.aaf490 (2016).
Zacharakis, N. et al. (2018). Immune recognition of somatic mutations leading to complete durable regression in metastatic breast cancer. Nature Medicine 04 June 2018.