A trial looking at a technique that uses your own white blood cells to treat your cancer

The study team were able to grow such T cells in the laboratory from 16 out of 27 patients and they successfully gave treated cells back to 6 of them. The other patients did not receive their cells because they were not well enough. Patients received up to 3 doses of T cells and none of them had any serious side effects.

By looking at blood samples, the researchers could see that the treated cells stayed in the circulation for up to 2 weeks. In one person, they could still detect the treated T cells a few months later.

In this study, cancer did not respond to this type of treatment, but the researchers are continuing to study this in the laboratory. They hope they may be able to test this technique in people again in the future.

We have based this summary on information from the team who ran the trial. As far as we are aware, the information they sent us has not been reviewed independently (peer reviewed ) or published in a medical journal yet. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.