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Title: America's NIH Scientists Have a Cancer Breakthrough. Layoffs are
Delaying It.

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/04/07/0...

Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune
cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of
Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post. But the results were published
in Nature Medicine on Tuesday - "the same day the agency was hit with
devastating layoffs..." The treatment approach is still early in its
development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only
about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers
enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the
study called the results "remarkable" because they highlight a path to a
frustratingly elusive goal in medicine - harnessing a person's own immune
defenses to target common solid tumor cancers. Until now, cell-based
immunotherapy has worked mainly on blood cancers, such as leukemia, but not
the solid cancers that seed tumors in the breast, brain, lungs, pancreas and
GI tract... But the progress arrives at a sad time for science - and for
patients, said the leader of the work, NIH immunotherapy pioneer Steven
Rosenberg. Two patients' treatments using the experimental therapy had to be
delayed because NIH's capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been
slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns.
Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday... The Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded to an email asking about
clinical trial delays with a statement: "NIH and HHS are complying with
President Trump's executive order." It's "a very exciting study," said
Patrick Hwu, president of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Finding ways to
tailor this cell-based immunotherapy approach to common solid tumors that
cause the vast majority of cancer deaths has remained a major scientific
challenge... Rosenberg and colleagues first tried to create tumor
infiltrating lymphocytes [or "TILs"] using the method that worked in melanoma
for 18 patients with GI cancers that had spread. It failed completely. In a
second iteration, his team sequenced the mutations present in each patient's
tumor and used that information to sift out and expand the TILs that could
home in on that patient's specific tumor cells. The results were far from a
triumph, but provided a clue - this time, three of 39 patients' tumors
shrank. In the last stage of the trial, the scientists added a drug called
pembrolizumab that takes the brakes off immune cells. This time, eight of the
34 patients responded. "Right now, only a few labs in the country can do what
they just did," Hwu said. While Rosenberg is already working "to refine and
improve upon the results," he told the Post that two scientists involved in
the specialized process of preparing the cells to treat patients were fired
in the probationary purge. "We've had to slow down our work and delay the
treatment of some patients...." And there's also dramatically fewer people
now who can purchase research materials, which the Post says it "making it
slower and more difficult to obtain supplies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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