Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: The Million-Copy Bestseller

by Peter Attia

There are two ways to do ACT. First, we can take a sample of a patient’s tumor and isolate those T cells that do recognize the tumor as a threat. These are called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), but there may only be a few million of them, not enough to mount a complete response against the tumor. By removing the TILs from the body and multiplying them by a factor of 1,000 or so, and then reinfusing them into the patient, we can expect to see a much better response. Alternatively, T cells can be harvested from the patient’s blood and genetically modified to recognize his or her specific tumor. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages,fn4 but the interesting part is that ACT effectively means designing a new, customized anticancer drug for each individual patient. This is obviously a costly proposition, and a very labor-intensive process, but it has a lot of promise.