…can be found here.
Of particular interest, of course, is the section headed “What Do These Results Mean For Human Cancer Therapy?”. Here’s some of it:
First, we should point out that in this mouse system the donor and recipient mice were both in the same in-bred laboratory strains of mice. Thus, except for the SR/CR mutation, they are genetically identical. Our transfer of immune cells between these mice is basically a transplantation experiment between identical twins. If we tried this therapy in human patients, the transferred immune cells would probably not survive, since the donor and recipient would be very different genetically.
However, these results show that the concept would work under the right circumstances. For example, if we identified the gene, it might be possible to take immune cells from a patient and insert that mutant gene into those cells in the test tube, then give these cells back to the same patient; this would then perhaps allow the mutant immune mechanism to work to reject tumor cells without the loss of the immune cells due to transplant rejection. However, this is a complex strategy that can have many potential problems.
A more important message from this work is that such a mechanism is actually possible in intact animals, and that a thorough understanding of the underlying molecular events could potentially lead to a new strategy for more specific cancer therapy.
