Leukemia cure far from reality: local oncologist
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2011 (5501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A local cancer expert advises leukemia patients not to get their hopes up yet about a new U.S. study that has shown startling results.
A Pennsylvania team has received international attention for its efforts in turning patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy cancer cells. Its work with three patients with advanced lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, was published Wednesday by two journals, including the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
But Dr. Dhali Dhaliwal, president and CEO of CancerCare Manitoba, said while the research is exciting, there are many questions to be answered, including whether the treatment is safe for patients.
“I think it is at an exciting research phase. It is not ready for clinical use,” said Dhaliwal, a medical oncologist and chemotherapy specialist who wrote a thesis on CLL years ago.
Winnipeg cancer researchers have had a long-standing interest in lymphocytic leukemia, with several experts working in the city. “In fact, for the past five years we have been holding national workshops here where all the experts in this area come together,” Dhaliwal said Thursday.
But he said if you were to survey those experts, they would say the new gene therapy given such wide publicity this week “is not ready for prime time.”
Dhaliwal described the research as “an early Phase 1 study” designed to determine if the technique used was safe. “But they saw dramatic responses, which led one of the world’s foremost journals to accept this paper as a brief rapid report, which normally would not be published.”
Still to be determined is how successful the gene therapy would be in a large study group. And then there are the very real concerns about patient safety. Initial reports stated the technique also destroys other infection-fighting blood cells in the body.
“It remains to be seen whether the long-term effects are going to be acceptable or not,” Dhaliwal said.
He said the technique may also prove to be too expensive for widespread use.
larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
