UChicago Medicine first in Midwest offering breakthrough treatment for cancer patients
It's a breakthrough in cancer treatment, and UChicago Medicine is one of the first hospitals to offer it.
It's not just one treatment, but can eventually become a whole new way to treat cancer.
Alla Pinzour has been fighting skin cancer for around 15 years—but not anymore.
"Right now, I am cancer-free. Not even in remission, cancer-free." Pinzour said.
She was first diagnosed in 2009. After years of surgery and treatment, the cancer started spreading to other organs.
"It kept coming back every few months," she said.
Pinzour doctors signed her up for a new kind of treatment. It uses the patient's own tumor-fighting T-cells, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs.
"By taking those TILs out of the patient and then expanding them and activating them in the lab, we go from, you know, maybe millions of T-cells that we find in the tumor and expanding it to billions of T-cells and then we infuse that back into the patient," said Dr. Daniel Olson, medical oncologist and clinical researcher at UChicago Medicine.
"Most of the complex biology of this process is already happening from the patient's immune system, and so, we're taking advantage of something that happens for reasons that we understand to some extent, but also for reasons that we probably don't understand fully."
The procedure is done in five steps.
Doctors remove a piece of the tumor and extract some of those TIL cells. Then, they boost them in a lab. Give the patient chemotherapy and put the TIL cells back in the patient, where they fight the tumor. Afterward, the patient can recover.
"Having a therapy like this is wonderful personally. It's great to offer patients a chance at a cure," Dr. Olsen said.
Although the concept has existed for decades, the actual treatment was approved last year. UChicago Medicine is the first to offer it in the Midwest.
"This is amazing, but we think it's just a start," Dr. Olsen said.
He is hoping it's the first step in a whole new way of treating cancers like the one that "was" threatening Pinzour's life.
"I call this a miracle," Pinzour said. "I'll probably be able to see my son graduate from medical school and my daughter get married, and I wasn't sure I would be able to see that.
Doctor Olson says researchers are already working on ways to use this kind of treatment to fight other types of cancer like lung, cervical, colon, and breast cancers.
