A Woman Given Months To Live From Advanced Breast Cancer Is 'Cured' In World First

Over the last few years, immunotherapy—the manipulation of one's own cells to boost the body's immune system—has been working wonders in cancer patients lucky enough to get accepted into early research trials.

One famous case is that of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who in 2016 beat stage 4 melanoma that had spread to his brain, after four months of treatment.

Details of another success, recently published in the journal Nature, involved a terminal patient with advanced stage breast cancer.

She was then enrolled at the US National Cancer Institute for a new kind of immunotherapy. The treatment used a process called adoptive cell transfer to remove one of the tumors from Perkins’s body and locate all the friendly T cells that were still able to recognize harmful cancer cells. Once the T cells were identified, they were extracted and multiplied until the scientists had an army of 90 billion cancer-fighting cells which they were then able to inject back into Perkins.

Within weeks, Perkins literally felt her tumors shrinking and improved so rapidly that she went on a 40-mile hike, suddenly freed from the pain that had left her incapacitated.

Successes like these are so exciting. And some of the treatments, which have none of the negative side effects associated with chemotherapy, are fairly inexpensive, compared to traditional cancer drugs. One touted Cuban vaccine that shrinks tumors in patients with advanced stages of lung cancer costs under $6,000 per year.

Scientists don't even group cancers by organ type anymore, having identified a number of traits inside cells that new drugs can target with remarkable efficacy across cancer types.

All these advancements make cancer research a thrilling field to keep your eyes on.