The Latest Breakthroughs That Could Help Bladder Cancer Patients

Toward the end of the 19th century, a New York City surgeon named Dr. William Coley purposely injected one of his patients with streptococcal bacteria. Coley wasn’t crazy. He hoped the bacterial infection would stimulate an immune response that would slow the spread of his patient’s cancer, which was inoperable. The experiment worked; the patient’s tumor shrank. For the next 40 years, Coley and his research collaborators would test similar remedies on more than 1,000 cancer patients. They had failures but also many successes, especially among people with bone or soft-tissue cancers. Today, Coley is sometimes called the father of immunotherapy, which is a branch of medicine that attempts to activate or modify a person’s immune system in ways that help treat disease. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Cancer remains one of the most active areas of immunotherapy research, and people with bladder cancer are among those who stand to benefit most from these medicines. “Bladder cancer is one of the cancers—along with melanoma, head and neck cancers, and kidney cancer—that are highly responsive to immunotherapy,” says Dr. Joaquin Bellmunt, director of the Bladder Cancer Program at the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Bellmunt says that bladder cancer is characterized by a high number of tumor mutations. The human body tends to regard these sorts of mutations as “antigens”—mea...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Disease freelance healthscienceclimate Source Type: news