The New York Times covered a story at the end of last year about the remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer who was treated with cells from her own immune system. Researchers are reporting that this may lead to new options for thousands of other patients with colon or pancreatic cancer. This is the first treatment to successfully target a common cancer mutation that until now has been described as “undruggable.”

An article about the case was originally published by The New England Journal of Medicine and can be read here.  The treatment was a form of immunotherapy, a field which is revolutionizing cancer treatment by using the immune system to fight disease. Without the insistence of the patient, Celine Ryan, the new discovery may have not been made when it was because researchers twice denied her request to enter the clinical trial. Ms. Ryan’s story is quite remarkable — read more about it in this New York Times article. She is now cancer-free, though not yet considered cured, and the research was a “real and solid step forward.”