British Woman Celebrates a Year of Living C...( ...),Health

LONDON, July 30 /PRNewswire/ -- It's been a year since fashion designer Joanne Scott went through a cancer treatment that changed her life -- and made history to boot.

Ms. Scott, 54, was the first person in the world to receive an injection of tumor-activated natural killer (TaNK) cells as a treatment for leukemia.

Her doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in London recommended this experimental therapy after two years of traditional treatments, including chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, failed to keep her in remission. Ms. Scott didn't expect it to work. "I thought that I was gonna get really sick again," she said, "like I had before."

But the new treatment succeeded where the others had failed, sparking hope among oncologists that TaNK cells could be the key to a new type of advanced cancer therapy.

Doctors at the Royal Free injected Ms. Scott with natural killer (NK) cells taken from her daughter, Tara, who was 21 at the time. The next day, Ms. Scott was able to go home from the hospital.

"I felt fine immediately. I was going out to dinner and things like that," Ms. Scott said. "It was really nice after all the other treatments I've had, which were very, very grueling."

The idea behind the new treatment is this: NK cells, which are part of the body's immune system, will target and fight any leukemia cells that survive chemotherapy if they are activated to fight the cancer. In cancer patients, however, the NK cells are not activated and do not attack the cancer cells.

Ms. Scott's doctors activated the cells they took from her daughter into TaNK cells, which can kill even NK-resistant tumors. Within a week of the injection, the TaNK cells had survived and multiplied. Within a month, a study of her bone marrow -- the site affected by the type of leukemia she had -- confirmed that the TaNK
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