More Details on T-Cell Leukemia Therapy

There's an excellent overview at Science of the work of David Porter and Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania on T-cell-based cancer therapy. It turns out that when the dramatic reports came out on their first three patients, the team was out of funding and trying to see if they could get someone interested. They did: . . .Porter and June weighed their next step. They were itching to test the cell therapy in more people with leukemia, and to do that they needed money that they didn’t have. “We basically decided that we would just publish with three patients,” June says. Getting the word out, he hoped, could shift the dynamic in their favor. Porter was game to try, but skeptical that any reputable journal would accept a paper with an n of 3. He turned out to be wrong. The New England Journal of Medicine welcomed a report about Olson and his mouse dose of T cells. Science Translational Medicine, Science’s sister journal, snapped up a manuscript detailing all three patients. The papers were published simultaneously on 10 August 2011. . .Porter was en route to vacation in western Maryland with his family when the embargo lifted. His phone started ringing. “I was in the car for 8 hours that day,” he says. “I spent 8 hours straight on my phone, answering e-mail, answering phone calls. It was a story that took us all by surprise. It kind of went viral.” June fielded 5000 requests from patients and their families for the therapy. Eight hundred media outlets w...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs