National Institutes of Health cancer researcher Steven Rosenberg says political turmoil is starting to affect his work, delaying experimental therapies for patients who don't have much time left. Rosenberg tells the Washington Post that even before last week's mass layoffs, the firing of skilled scientists who were still on their probationary periods delayed treatment for two patients. "Everything I try to do, I try to do at warp speed. These are people with desperate illnesses and nowhere to go," Rosenberg says. "These are not patients that have very many months left." He says "assuming things don't get any worse," the treatments have been delayed by a month.
Rosenberg, 84, has long led research into the harnessing of patients' own immune cells to attack cancers, the Post reports. In a study published in the journal Nature last week, Rosenberg and his team said they had made progress in harvesting immune cells called tumor infiltrating lymphocytes—TILs—from patients' tumors, growing them into large quantities in the lab, and administering them to patients to fight metastatic gastrointestinal cancers. Similar therapies had previously only been effective in blood cancers. "We're seeing the first extension of cellular therapy with TILs into the common solid cancers," Rosenberg said in a NIH news release.
"We see a little crack in the solid wall of cancer by using cell-based immunotherapy for the common solid cancers, and we think we have ways to open that crack even further," he said. The scientists who were fired were involved in developing personalized cell therapies for patients. Rosenberg tells the Post that firings have also slowed down the purchasing of supplies and he doesn't know if nine scientists on his team will have their appointments renewed. "If they are not, that will set us back more," Rosenberg says. "We've had to slow down our work and delay the treatment of some patients." (More cancer research stories.)
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