Washington (H24N). Researchers say a new therapy for kidney cancer was able to reduce or reverse the disease in more than half of the patients treated.

Doctors at the National Institutes of Health say blood stem cell transplants from siblings were able to create an immune response in some patients suffering from advanced renal cell carcinoma, a disease that’s notoriously resistant to traditional cancer therapies, and is usually fatal.

The study of 19 cancer patients was conducted at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Stem Cell Transplant unit. The therapy they underwent takes advantage of a long-known drawback of bone marrow transplants, that is, the tendency of transplanted cells to attack tissues in the recipient’s body. In essence researchers were hoping to harness that effect, and steer the brunt of the attack toward the cancerous kidneys.

Patients were first given immunosuppressive drugs to reduce the chance they would reject the bone marrow donation, then infused with the donor cells. Additional immunosuppressive drugs were administered, then tapered off. The study shows 10 of the 19 treated responded "dramatically"; the tumors disappeared in three cases, and shrank by more than 50 percent in seven other cases.

Researchers have used such transplants in the past to treat leukemia and lymphoma, but this was the first time they enlisted the immune response to attack a solid tumor. "We are very encouraged by the early high response rate in our first group of patients treated, with a few patients remaining completely free of cancer more than two years from the initiation of therapy," said Richard Childs, M.D., principal investigator.

But he cautions there were complications associated with the procedure. By design the transplants cause Graft Versus Host disease (GVHD), a condition where the transplanted cells may also attack the recipient’s skin, intestinal tract and liver along with the tumors. In one case a patient died from GHVD; in another a patient died from complications brought on by bacterial sepsis. Addressing those complications, Childs suggests the therapy should remain an "investigational approach at this time," until more studies can be done.

W. Marston Linehan, M.D., a researcher at the National Cancer Institute’s Urologic Oncology Branch, says doctors are hoping to expand the number of patients who can enroll in the clinical trial. "The ultimate objective is to test this therapy in a large, randomized controlled trial to determine the true efficacy of this treatment."

Details of the study are published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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