NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Hat tip, the Washington Post

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link:https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/nih-scientists-have-a-cancer-breakthrough-layoffs-are-delaying-it/ar-AA1Co50C|NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.]

Story by Carolyn Y. Johnson • 12h

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers in a paper in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs that left many NIH personnel in tears.

The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results “remarkable” because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person’s own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers.

Until now, cell-based immunotherapy has worked mainly on blood cancers, such as leukemia, but not the solid cancers that seed tumors in the breast, brain, lungs, pancreas and GI tract.

“I think this is a very exciting study,” said Patrick Hwu, president of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. “There’s still a lot of work to do … but this is a really great start in the right direction.”

But the progress arrives at a sad time for science — and for patients, said the leader of the work, NIH immunotherapy pioneer Steven Rosenberg.

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