THE blood of a brother or sister might help people fight cancer.
Some cancer patients are given bone marrow transplants from a sibling to compensate for the effects of chemotherapy, and doctors have long suspected that immune cells from the donor attack the cancer more vigorously than the patient’s own. Now Michael Bishop’s team at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research in Bethesda, Maryland, has proved it.
They injected T-cells extracted from the blood of immuno-compatible siblings into 15 women with breast cancer, several weeks after they had finished chemotherapy. The tumours shrank in about half of the…
