Okay, this is continued from yesterday’s post (Norweigian in Beijing: Successful Brain Cancer Treatment?).

The patient in the story was Arve Johnsen, a 36 year-old Norweigian whose glioma went into relapse and he was told there was nothing in Europe that could be done.  This 2008 article about Edward Kennedy describes the gliomas as generally being uncurable, i.e. they often relapse after several years. Then Arve found Cellonis, the creators of the treatment at issue, and he flew out with his family to try it out.  Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) play an important role in this treatment, and in cancer in general, as they can be the cause of cancer relapses if traditional cancer treatments do not remove them from the body.  I think of them as stem cells’ bizarro-world counterparts.

So the treatment Cellonis uses consists of three components:  conventional cancer treatments, cell therapies, and Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Cellonis called it comprehensive cancer treatment (CCT).  They do not mention exactly which conventional cancer treatments are used, nor do they mention what type of TCM is used.  I would be very interested to know these things, as it seems like laying their cell therapies on top of conventional cancer treatments is already a handful, throwing in TCM into an experimental treatment seems messy.

The claimed cell treatment essentially uses the body’s own immune system to seek out CSCs.  They do this with dendritic cells (DCs, not related to neurons), which are part of the immune system.  They “digest” antigens (shapes of protein from a certain source that the body will then form antibodies to), then present those antigens to other cells in the immune system so that those cells know what to make antibodies to.  In Cellonis’s treatment, they take DCs and CSCs from the patient (I don’t know how easy or hard locating, removing, and culturing the CSCs), then lyse the CSCs and present them to the DCs so that the DCs can get ready to present antigens to the immune system.  Then at some point these primed DCs are put back into the body so the immune system can do its thing.

Arve Johnson arrived in Beijing August of this year, and as of the writing of the article (December 17), he had done two cycles of treatment.  They first used CCT, wherein the DCs were presented with SHG-44, a glioma cell line.  This glioma cell line only seems to be in use in China, as all articles that come up in a google search are based on work in China.  I’ll have to find a source which has a database on Chinese cell lines.  That didn’t work, and they did a second cycle with the DCs targeted to his CSCs (although the article isn’t clear if this was in addition to all of the other treatments or not) and the “results looked promising” but they were waiting for “more clinical trials to confirm the outcome.”

I suppose I’ll put it on my to-do list to check on this story in a month or so and see if anything came of it!