An article in the New England Journal of Medicine describes how immunotherapy helped a 52-year-old man from Oregon cure his melanoma, which had spread to a lung and to a lymph node in his groin.

Back in July 2005, the man enrolled in a clinical trial at Fred Hutchinson’s Cancer Research Institute in Seattle, along with eight other men diagnosed with cancer.

Dr. Cassian Yee, an associate member at the Center and the author of the article in NEJM, along with his colleagues used immunotherapy, a therapy in which our own immune system fights cancerous cells. More exactly, the scientists looked for special immune system cells called CD4+T cells in a blood sample provided by the melanoma patient, specifically the CD4+T cells that target the patient’s melanoma.

Then, they isolated these cells and cloned them in five billion clones in their lab over several months, which they put back into the patient.

Surprisingly, the man responded remarkably well to this treatment. Two months later, his cancerous tumors were no longer there and two years after, the man remained disease-free.

However, the eight other patients enrolled in the experiment did not have the same improvements as the Oregon man, as none had his cancer gone. Dr. Yee couldn’t explain why the therapy had different results although used the in the same way. Therefore, more study is needed “to confirm the effectiveness of therapy,” Dr. Yee said.

Louis M. Weiner, MD, director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, shared the same opinion. In an editorial accompanying the study, he called the case “remarkable,” but cautioned that this therapy might not always work as cancers have many tactics to defeat the immune system.

However, the fact that this therapy worked, even if just in one case, shows research seems to be heading in the right direction, giving hope to so many people developing cancer every day.