Extremely encouraging news for cancer patients

Although the researchers are very careful to avoid drawing any larger claim to a breakthrough, it's still very hopeful:

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy".

Experts said that the case could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.

It's unlikely, even if this therapy proves to be as effective in wider trials as it was in this particular case, that this is the end of cancer as a major health threat. It does, however, encourage hope that cancer will eventually be easily treatable (and, even more beneficially, with relatively minimal intervention in the body).