A 'Killer' immunotherapy treatment has show early promise in attacking cancer cells that are usually hard to treat.
That's according to a report in the Irish Daily Mail today.
Terminally ill cancer patients could get more time with their loved ones as researchers have been trialing the drug, AFM24, and say it shows signs of effectiveness in a third of patients with advanced cancers that had stopped responding to treatment, including bowel, lung and pancreatic cancers.
Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London tested the drug on 24 patients in an early-stage trial.
One patient with lung cancer and two with bowel cancer saw their tumours shrink or stop growing for more than three months.
The drug was given through a drip and safely led natural killer cells to target a protein called EGFR, which is found in cancers.
Experts says it could be safer, cheaper and faster than an alternative immunotheraqpy called CAR-T, which require changing a patients own cells.
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment which trains the body's own immune system to recognise and fight the disease.
Chief executive of the UK's Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Kristian Helin, said 'So far, we've only seen initial findings in a small group of patients, but the results look promising and we're optimistic that this could be a new type of immunotherapy for cancers that are otherwise hard to treat.'
Monday 11th April is the day the results will be presented at the American Association for Cancer Research conference in New Orleans.
