The problem: His leukemia cells contained a mutation that made them resistant to Gleevec's effect.
The engineered cells are then infused back into the patient, primed to hunt down the leukemia cells.
The aim of post-remission maintenance therapy is to destroy leukemia cells that survived induction chemotherapy but are undetectable.
CNN: Are there any treatments for acute myelogenous leukemia?
Williams started the twice-daily pill in July 2005, and after six months most of the leukemia cells were gone.
He found that when he transplanted a million human leukemia cells, full-scale tumors would almost always take hold in the mice.
With University of Maryland mathematician Doron Levy, he has been studying why the immune system can't wipe out leukemia cells that are missed by the breakthrough drug Gleevec.
Cancer research "is a little like physics before Isaac Newton, " says evolutionary biologist Franziska Michor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who has devised a model of how leukemia cells respond to the drug Gleevec.
However, analyzing the data from another study indicated that elesclomol was highly active against cells from acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
He eventually isolated stem cells for human acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and published the finding in 1994.
Five patients with a lethal leukemia achieved complete and rapid remissions after the treatment, in which cells from their own immune systems were genetically altered to specifically attack the disease.
These mutant stem cells already have been found in breast cancer, two types of leukemia and multiple myeloma.
The widely publicized patient, Timothy Brown, was treated for leukemia with a bone marrow transplant that happened to come from a donor with a genetic mutation that makes immune cells resist HIV infection.
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