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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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11029922.000
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 23HEALTH & SCIENCECancer Counterattack
A vaccine made from patients' own cells helps treat B-cell
lymphoma
The human immune system is a powerful defense against
assaults by bacteria and viruses from outside the body, but now
scientists may have found a way to turn it against a homegrown
assailant: cancer. A research group at Stanford University has
developed a vaccine that stimulates the body to fight B-cell
lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that strikes 20,000
Americans every year and is especially hard to treat. They did
it by removing cancerous cells from nine patients and treating
the cells to make them more irritating to the immune system.
Then they were reinjected under the patients' skin. In two
cases, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine,
tumors actually shrank, while five other patients showed
markedly increased immune-system activity. The vaccine isn't a
preventive and can only be used on a single patient and against
this type of cancer. But the technique may someday be used on
other cancers and also on such diseases as multiple sclerosis,
diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.