Cancer Counterattack

THE HUMAN IMMUNE SYSTEM IS A POWERFUL DEfense against assaults by bacteria and viruses from outside the body, but now scientists may have found a way to turn it against a homegrown assailant: cancer. A research group at Stanford University has developed a vaccine that stimulates the body to fight B-cell lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that strikes 20,000 Americans every year and is especially hard to treat. They did it by removing cancerous cells from nine patients and treating the cells to make them more irritating to the immune system. Then they were reinjected under the patients’ skin. In two cases, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, tumors actually shrank, while five other patients showed markedly increased immune-system activity. The vaccine isn’t a preventive and can only be used on a single patient and against this type of cancer. But the technique may someday be used on other cancers and also on such diseases as multiple sclerosis, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.