“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants“
While science was the subject of Isaac Newton’s above quote in a 1676 letter to his rival Robert Hooke [shown exactly as he wrote it] it could quite easily be applied to medicine in general and certainly to cancer. Cancer claimed a giant recently when Terry Hamblin passed away, a pioneer of stem cell research now considered by some to be the best long-term cure for cancer and certainly an alternative to the toxic drugs used in chemotherapy.
The three types of treatment for cancer have the nicknames: cut (surgery) burn (radio therapy) and poison (chemo therapy).
Hamblin’s stem cell treatment for lymphoma using the patient’s blood rather than drilling into bone marrow for example, is now a standard treatment and far less invasive.
Professor Terry Hamblin who has died age 68 was a haematologist who delivered the “world’s first cancer vaccine”
Hamblin injected Catherine Nosrati, a lymphoma patient who was then 42, with the so-called DNA “vaccine” at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in 1999. In theory, the “vaccine” works by combining genetic material from a cancer cell with a harmless part of a toxin, thus stimulating the body’s immune system to destroy the toxin – and the cancer cell along with it. More than a decade after the first “vaccination”, trial programmes are still under way. According to an article in the International Journal of Medical Microbiology, “genetic immunisation with {DNA vaccines} has proven to be a promising tool in conferring protective immunity against tumours in various animal experiments”. Its effectiveness for humans, however, remains to be established.
Hamblin, known as “Prof” to his friends, dedicated most of his working life to leukaemia research, in particular chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), the most common form of the disease. It had long been known that for about half of people with CLL, the disease grows and progresses slowly, and it may take years for symptoms to appear or for treatment to be needed. The other half have a more aggressive form of the disease and need treatment sooner. Hamblin and colleagues carried out DNA analysis and discovered that the disease indeed had two molecular forms, one giving patients an average of 25 years’ survival and the other, only eight years. As a result it became possible for clinicians to reassure many patients, especially older ones with the more slowly progressing form of the disease, that they would probably not need any treatment in their lifetimes.
In the early 1980s, Hamblin carried out the first successful “autologous” stem cell transplant into a lymphoma sufferer using stem cells from the patient’s blood. Previously, the procedure had involved taking stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, an unpleasant and invasive procedure. The use of blood for stem cell transplants is now a standard procedure.
Terence John Hamblin was born in Worcester on March 12 1943 and studied Medicine at Bristol University. After a series of jobs in Bristol and Poole, Dorset, he was appointed Consultant Haematologist at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in 1974 at the young age of 31.
At Bournemouth Hamblin and his colleagues developed a first class haematology service, and for about 30 years he travelled regularly to the Southampton Medical School, attending seminars, talking to academic scientists, and integrating scientific data. A professor at Southampton University from 1987, Hamblin became an expert in plasma exchange; myelodysplastic syndrome; monoclonal antibody therapy; stem cell transplantation; and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.
He was also an honorary consultant haematologist at Kings College Hospital, London, editor-in-chief of the medical journal Leukaemia Research, and a regular columnist for the magazine World Medicine. His publications include Plasmapheresis and Plasma Exchange (1979); Immunological Investigation of Lymphoid Neoplasms (1983); Haematological Problems in the Elderly (1987); and Immunotherapy of Disease (1990) .
Perhaps unusually for a scientist, Hamblin was a devout Christian of fundamentalist views (among other things he was vice-president of the Biblical Creation Society and served as deacon of his local Baptist church). He kept a blog, in which commentary on the latest discoveries in cancer research alternated with thoughts on biblical texts. Yet he was sensitive to his audience and if the subject of the Bible came up in conversation with non-believer colleagues, he would address issues in a secular manner. [unusual for a fundamentalist]
He raised large sums for cancer research and in 2002 he was awarded the Binet-Rai medal for outstanding research in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.