Cancer cure news update: New treatment from California's City of Hope made tumors disappear

An ongoing clinical trial at a cancer center in California, known as City of Hope, made a breakthrough when tumors vanished from a man who was receiving treatment for brain cancer.

Richard Grady, 50, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a brain tumor that had spread cancer in different parts of his body through his spine. Grady enrolled himself for the clinical trial at the City of Hope in Duarte, California, where an immunotherapy treatment called CAR-T therapy was being developed.

The treatment was mainly used for blood cancer patients, but Associated Press confirmed that the CAR-T therapy was able to get rid of Grady's tumors. Before Grady, the CAR-T therapy's effect on tumors was unknown until it was administered in a different manner.

The CAR-T therapy was administered to Grady by taking T cells from his blood, which were genetically modified so that they can develop into cancer-destroying cells.

But prior to the CAR-T therapy, Grady had already gone through surgeries to manually remove some of his tumors. After having surgeries, he received weekly infusions of his genetically modified T cells for six weeks through a tube that went into his brain. When Grady's tumors continued to grow, that's when the doctors decided to alter the treatment.

They added another tube into Grady's brain, where it was directly connected to the cavity that produces spinal fluid.

"The idea was to have the flow of the spinal fluid carry the T cells to different locations," City of Hope's neurosurgery chief Dr. Behnam Badie explained.

It took Grady a total of 10 treatments before all his tumors vanished.

Unfortunately, seven months later, new tumors have developed in his brain, and Grady had to revert back to radiation treatment. But Badie said, "For him to live more than a year and a half" from a condition where the only guarantee is having weeks of survival is still amazing.

Meanwhile, another type of therapy by a research team from the University of Coimbra, Portugal has had similar effects of completely diminishing tumors.

According to Pravda, the treatment is called photodynamic therapy where a molecule called redaporphine is activated by infrared light, and when it comes into contact with oxygen, it creates other molecules that destroy tissues surrounding it. The treatment is administered directly to the tumor, leaving the healthy tissues undamaged.

Only the first clinical trial on human subjects has been done, and it resulted positively in cancer treatment for the head and the neck areas. The development team and clinical trial team at the University of Coimbra will begin administering the photodynamic therapy on a larger scale, and they hope that it will be safely available for cancer patients in 2022.