New treatment for advanced breast cancer: Ribociclib

This year, 253,000 women will be diagnosed this year with invasive breast cancer, and for women battling advanced forms of the disease, there’s now a new treatment. Doctors are calling it a first line of defense for advanced breast cancer. With a hot pink ride, decked out with lighted wheels, nothing is going to get in the way of mother Sally McGiffin and her daughter Shannon McGiffin.

Not even cancer. “When we first got diagnosis we sat and cried maybe half an hour to an hour, and then she looked at me and said this disease is not going to beat me,” Sally told Ivanhoe.

That attitude and a newly-approved FDA drug called Ribociclib, has kept Shannon McGiffin’s stage four metastic breast cancer under control. “It’s a miracle. It really is a miracle for me to be able to have survived this long.” Shannon said. Oncologist Heather Han, MD, of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida says when combined with hormonal therapy, Ribociclib stops signals that cancer cells use to grow and divide. “I’m obviously very excited that this drug finally actually quickly got approved, and I’m able to be there to help patients to do better,” Dr. Han explained.

Doctor Han says the Ribociclib combination can be used as the first line of defense. The risk of progression or death has been reduced by 44 percent. Dr. Han continued, “So it’s been in clinical trial for several years, but FDA was able to approve it quickly when it showed dramatic improvement of the patients.” The side effects for her have been high blood sugar levels and fatigue. “I do spend a lot of my time sleeping,” Shannon admitted. For Shannon, it’s not a cure, but it has given her precious time with those who matter most. Candidates for this drug usually can be patients with newly diagnosed advanced breast cancer, hormone receptor positive and HER2 negative. Patients’ EKGs must be monitored in the first few weeks of taking the drug to make sure it doesn’t cause any cardiac issues.

Memory cells enhance strategy for fighting blood cancers

TINA HESMAN SAEY

Stem cells with memory may improve a powerful new type of cancer therapy.

Recently, scientists have engineered cells from a patient’s own immune system to fight blood cancers. The treatment with the engineered immune cells, called CAR-T cell therapy, may work even better if doctors transplant a subset of immune cells known as memory T cells, researchers reported February 14 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

A single engineered memory T cell was enough to replenish the infection-fighting ability of mice lacking T cells, said Dirk Busch, an immunologist the Technical University of Munich. That finding indicates that very low numbers of the cells in the body could be enough to protect human patients from maladies ranging from infections to cancer.

In preliminary clinical trials, CAR-T cell therapy using the memory T cells eliminated cancer in 27 of 29 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, for whom other treatments had failed. Stanley Riddell, an immunotherapy researcher at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, reported the finding. Memory CAR-T cell therapy also melted away tumors in six of seven patients in whom cancer had spread from the bone marrow to other parts of the body. And 10 of 11 patients who had previously undergone CAR-T cell therapy with a mixed bag of engineered T-cells were in remission after being treated with just the engineered memory cells, Riddell reported.

Only a few hundred to a few thousand of the memory cells were needed to melt a patient’s tumor, Riddell said. The low doses also lessened side effects of the therapy, he said.

CAR-T cells are genetically engineered versions of immune cells called T cells. T cells prowl the body and identify invaders, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites and other foreign cells. For decades, researchers have been trying to boost cancer patients’ immune systems in order to kill cancer cells. Recently, researchers have created CAR-T or “chimeric antigen receptor” T cells that make proteins that allow the cells to track down and kill particular types of cells. Researchers removed T cells from ALL patients and genetically engineered the cells to hunt and destroy cells that make a protein called CD19. Such cells include antibody-producing B cells, which overgrow in patients with ALL and some other types of lymphoma or leukemia.

Gene edited CAR-T cells were recently used to treat a baby with leukemia.  Engineered memory T cells can persist in patients for at least 14 years, Chiara Bonini of the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, reported. Such cells may “act as a living drug that can persist and respond in a patient in case the tumor comes back,” she said.