Experimental Therapy Used to Treat Senator Harry Reid Is Explained by His Doctor, Patrick Soon-Shiong

“Our goal is to create what I call the cancer vaccine, but using your own tumor tissue, that’s sitting there as the fund,” Dr. Soon-Shiong says.

The Science Behind the Therapy: Explained

While other cancer treatments often incorporate high-doses of chemotherapy and radiation, Dr. Soon-Shiong upends that trend by saying those methods completely wipe out individuals’ immune systems. Instead, this new form of immunotherapy attempts to use multiple parts of the immune systems to destroy tumors. In order to do this, one needs to expose the tumor by activating three cells in the body  the natural killer cell, the T cell, and macrophage.

“Once you’ve killed those cells with your immune system, you’ve trained them to remember  and that’s remember me,” says Dr. Soon-Shiong. “So it’s going from hide me, to find me, kill me, and remember me. That’s what we do. It’s scientifically complex, but the protocols are pretty straightforward.”

While many experimental therapies and treatments require patients to stay in the hospital, Dr. Soon-Shiong’s trial is outpatient. So, participants will be administered a protein through an IV to activate the natural killer cell and T cell and then are able to leave afterwards. The experimental therapy is currently offered at two locations in Southern California, including The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Medicine in El Segundo, California.

“We want this to be the treatment of the future,” Dr. Soon-Shiong says. “What’s exciting is not only have we done this with pancreatic cancer, [but] we’ve done this with lung cancer; we’ve done this with triple negative breast cancer; we’e done this with head and neck cancer, [and] cervical cancer.”

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