DThe fight against cancer has been fought for many years through operations, vaccinations and drugs, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The approach to strengthening the body’s defenses with the help of immunotherapy has appeared relatively recently. At the Northwestern Hospital in Frankfurt, a man with advanced prostate cancer could be cured with a procedure that was previously seen as promising mainly for breast or skin cancer. The success of the treatment was so unusual that it merited a separate case report in the Journal of Cancer Immunotherapy in December 2022.
The man, whose medical history was described by the head physician of the oncology department, Elke Jager and her team, has not had a tumor for more than four years. The fact that cancer researchers are only now reporting this success has to do with the course of the disease. Before immunotherapy, metastases in soft tissues grew and the oncomarker PSA increased, indicating the activity of the disease. After treatment, all metastases developed completely, and the PSA level permanently dropped below 0.01 nanograms per milliliter. In this case, “we actually assume that this patient is cured, although this rarely happens in such advanced cases of the disease,” says the head physician.
Source: Frantfurter Allgemeine
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