New frontier in cancer care: Turning blood into living drugs

Ken Shefvelands body was swollen with cancer, treatment after treatment failing until doctors gambled on a radical approach: They removed some of his immune cells, engineered them into cancer assassins and unleashed them into his bloodstream. A potential breakthrough in the fight against cancer uses a person's own immune cells to create what's being called a "living drug."Cancer researcher Dr. David Maloney says they're testing a therapy using a genetically modified population a patient's own T-cells...The drugs grow inside the body into an army that seeks and destroys tumors......and the hope is a patient would receive a one-time infusion of the supercharged immune cells......that would attack stubborn forms of leukemia or lymphoma.Patient Claude Bannick says he was almost dead from leukemia but the experimental T-cell therapy put his cancer into remission...Because the drug is essentially made "to order" with a person's blood...there's a two week wait while it's brewed in a lab...Right now only patients with certain forms of cancer are eligible...But when and if the procedure gets F-D-A approval, more hospitals will be able to offer it.