The head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center says it's entirely plausible that within the next 10 years, there will be cures and new therapies for every kind of human cancer.
It's not just a theory. Patients are already starting to benefit from this new single-dose treatment.
Milton Wright III was running out of options after his leukemia came back for the third time. Game over. Or so he thought.
"After your third time, they can't do much for you," he said.
But he was in luck, becoming one of the first patients to receive a new treatment using his own disease-fighting T- cells taken out and grown in the lab.
Dr. Gary Gilliland says it's all about amping up the patient's immune system.
"We can genetically engineers those cells to become—if you will—heat seeking missiles that can seek out and destroy cancer cells without destroying normal cells," he said.
It's worked for Milton and others with blood-borne cancers.
"We've developed treatments that don't involve chemotherapy, they don't involve radiation therapy. They've been used to treat refractory cancers like leukemia that haven't responded to any of the other treatments we have including bone marrow transplantation and it's just astonishing to see how these tumors melt away," said Gilliland.
Melt away and without the toxic side effects of traditional cancer treatments. And in patients who had no hope, Gilliland says he's never seen anything like it before.
"It's a single dose that we think will cure cancer. We're not trying to develop treatments. We're actually trying to develop therapies that have curative intent," he said.
He predicts some of these therapies will be available in the near future, and there's every reason to believe other cancers will also respond to the this groundbreaking approach.
The acceleration and optimism is being fueled by this week's announcement of $1 billion investment (by Celgene) to Juno Therapeutics, a Fred Hutchinson spinoff company that is developing these new therapies.
