A man has been cured of skin cancer after injections of five billion clones of his own immune cells, according to a mass of media coverage. This is one of those “whoa” moments, both in an ‘amazing’ way and a ‘not so fast’ way.

Cassian Yee, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues in the US, took a type of white blood cell called CD4 T Cells from their patient; selected ones that target his melanoma; grew loads of them; and put them back in the patient (research paper in the NEJM). No tumours were found in the man two years after treatment, despite previous cancers being detected in his body.

“We were surprised by the anti-tumor effect of these CD4 T cells and its duration of response,” says Yee (press release). “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”

The Wall Street Journal says the finding is a ‘surprising result’ but also the “latest hopeful finding from the 30-year-old field of ‘adoptive immunotherapy’”. Despite promising research in the 80s, says the paper, actual successful cancer treatments have been slow to materialise (subscription required for WSJ).

Bloomberg says eight other patients have had the treatment and although the severe form of cancer being treated normally kills in a year it has stopped spreading in some subjects. It’s still too early to tell if anyone will improve as dramatically as the patient detailed in the NEJM though.

Here in the UK, the BBC quotes Karol Sikora, cancer expert at Imperial College in London, as saying, “I think we will be able to harness the power of the immune system. Eventually we will learn how to control cancer, in other words we will suppress it. Patients will live with their cancer, and die with their cancer, but not of their cancer – it will be like diabetes today.”

The Daily Telegraph quotes Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, who says, “This is another interesting demonstration of the huge power of the immune system to fight some types of cancer. Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone’s own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging for the work that Cancer Research UK and others are carrying out.”

In a column running with the article the paper’s science editor Roger Highfield warns “Immunotherapy could still be closer to a fluke than cure.”