Sydney, Oct 20: Australian researchers on Monday unveiled a breakthrough treatment for cancer that uses genetically altered blood cells to kill tumours.
Melbourne's Peter McCallum Cancer Centre said it hoped to begin human trials in two years after the treatment proved effective on mice.


Associate professor Joe Trapani said the treatment involved taking hundreds of millions of white blood cells from the sufferer. The cells’ DNA is then genetically altered so they can recognise the tumour and attack it.

“What we’ve shown so far is that you can take the cells from the immune system from the animal itself, treat them outside the body to be able to recognise cancer and then inject them into the body,” he said. “Instead of having a few, perhaps one in 1,000 cells that can recognise the tumour, now we have virtually 100 per cent of them that can home in and so the attack on the tumour is much, much greater.”


The treatment could ultimately be used to tackle many types of cancers but researchers plan to begin by targeting commoner forms. Bureau Report