Use of Gene Therapy for the Treatment of Melanoma

Melanoma, or cancer of the pigment cells, is one of, if not the most deadly forms of cancer known. Although your risk of developing Melanoma increases as you get older, people of any age are at risk for it, and it is, in fact, the most commonly developed cancer among young adults, with over 50,000 people discovering they have it and about 7910 people dying of it each year. Fortunately, Melanoma is easily treated in its early stages, but once it metastasizes to other organs deeper within the body, it becomes exponentially harder to treat. This horrible illness may soon be a thing of the past, however, as new breakthroughs in gene therapy are helping to treat it in ways never before possible.

One of the most promising ways of using gene therapy to treat melanoma is a process in which doctors use autologous lymphocytes, the patients own white blood cells to fight cancer. Doctors are able to do this by delivering a set of genes through a retrovirus that tells the cells to recognize and attack cancer cells. The virus acts in much the same way as a carrier pigeon; in that it carries the genetic instructions to command T-cell receptors to recognize and bind to certain proteins present on a tumors surface. A clinical trial was done in 2006 to test the effectiveness of this treatment, in which seventeen patients with severe metastatic melanoma were subjected to this treatment. Unfortunately, out of all seventeen patients, only two showed any improvement, but luckily, there are no toxic side effects contributed to the genetically modified cells in any of the seventeen patients.

While there are very few, if any, ethical concerns with the treatment of melanoma itself, there are some concerns with the clinical trials surrounding it. Because most genes in the human body control more than one single aspect, the turning on of one gene may have another, unexpected result. For example, by turning on the gene to tell T-Cell Receptors to attack cancer may also cause harm by, say, causing the T-Cell Receptors to attack not only cancer, but also healthy cells. Although this is a very real risk, I, personally, believe that the possible benefits outweigh the risks. This is because If the therapy does, in fact, kill even fifty percent of the people subjected to it, the remaining fifty percent would, in essence, be cured of cancer.

With melanoma levels so high in the United States, it is almost imperative that a new, more effective type of treatment that can be used to fight the more advanced cases of melanoma that has metastasized to other organs that would be previously untreatable. Hopefully, with this new genetic technology, we will someday be able to eradicate this horrible disease.