East and West: Funeral provider Stewart Enterprises Inc. is dividing its operations into eastern and western divisions. Jefferson-based Stewart says the move is designed to better integrate its operations and sales activities. Stewart owns and operates 218 funeral homes and 141 cemeteries in the United States and Puerto Rico.
A ray of hope: Scientists are reporting the first clear success with gene therapy to treat leukemia, turning the patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt down and wipe out the cancer. The therapy has only been done in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third has had a partial response. Scientists are already preparing to try the approach for other kinds of cancer. “It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did,” says Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last.” June led the study, published today by two journals, New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. Scientists have been working for years to find ways to boost the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. Earlier attempts at genetically modifying bloodstream soldiers called T-cells have had limited success; the modified cells didn’t reproduce well and quickly disappeared. June and his colleagues made changes to the technique, using a novel carrier to deliver the new genes into the T-cells and a signaling mechanism to instruct the cells to kill and multiply.
