Stem Cell May Help Fight Kidney Cancer

B O S T O N, Sept. 13 -- An experimental cancertreatment in which patients receive bone marrow cells from abrother or sister, combined with drugs that suppress theirimmune system, is showing promise against incurable kidneycancer.

The discovery, outlined in Thursday’s New England Journalof Medicine, “opens new therapeutic possibilities not only formetastatic renal-cell cancer but also for other solid tumorsthat are resistant to conventional chemotherapy andradiotherapy,” said Dr. Shimon Slavin of Hadassah UniversityHospital in Jerusalem.

The technique, used by Dr. Richard Childs of the NationalHeart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, takesadvantage of the fact that certain donated blood cells, knownas stem cells, often mount an attack against the body ingeneral and cancer cells in particular.

Childs and his colleagues found that by temporarilyweakening the immune system and injecting stem cells from amatching sibling, they could train some of the newly injectedcells to attack the tumor.

No Current Treatments

“Considering that there are no current treatments thatbenefit patients who have not responded to conventionaltherapy,” Childs said in a statement, “we are very encouragedby the early high response rate in the first group ofpatients.”

But because nine of the 19 the patients had no response atall and the side effects of the treatment killed two,researchers warn that it is still experimental.

And because it can take months for the body to attack thetumor, patients with rapidly advancing disease, “who would beunlikely to live long enough for the generation of agraft-versus tumor effect, would not benefit from suchtherapy,” the Childs team said.

Nonetheless, 10 of the 19 patients had a positive responseto the tumor. In three of those cases the tumors disappeared, asurprising finding when most people with kidney cancer surviveless than a year, chemotherapy is usually ineffective, and theexperiment was done on patients whose tumors had failed torespond to past treatments.