BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhuanet)-- Researchers have successfully saved the life of an advanced skin cancer patient by treating him with clones of his own immune cells, according to this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

    Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who treated the dying patient extracted white blood cells, the key component of the immune system, and grew the infection-fighting T cells in the laboratory.

    The cloned T cells were then reinfused to the patient to fight the cancer.

    The 52-year-old man had recurrent melanoma that failed to respond to therapy or surgery when he enrolled in a clinical trial.

    The disease had spread to his lungs and a lymph node before he received the two-hour infusion of the lab-grown immune system cells. Sixty days later, all signs of the disease were gone.

    Researchers said the approach might allow them to fight cancer with safer and less invasive methods than the surgery, radiation and chemotherapy medications that are often used.

    If the new approach is successful in trials, it may be used to treat 25 percent of all patients with late-stage melanoma similar to the disease in the study, said Cassian Yee,  senior author of the paper and an associate member of the clinical research division,

    Melanoma, typically caused by excessive sun exposure, starts innocuously. It first appears as a tiny mole but, within a couple of months, begins growing relentlessly. Gradually, it works its way under the skin, spreading cancer cells throughout the body.

(Agencies)