Research published today in Nature Medicine by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has described a new immunotherapy approach, which led to a complete disappearance of tumors in a woman with advanced metastatic breast cancer who only had months to live.

The findings show how naturally-occurring tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) were extracted from the patient’s tumor, grown outside of her body to boost their numbers and injected back into the patient to tackle the cancer. The patient had previously received several treatments including hormone therapies and chemotherapy, but nothing had stopped the cancer progressing. After the treatment, all of the patient’s tumors disappeared and 22 months later, she is still in remission.

Researchers are particularly enthusiastic about the potential of TILs to treat a group of cancers termed ‘common epithelial cancers’, which include those of the colon, rectum, pancreas, breast and lung, together accounting for 90% of all deaths due to cancer in the U.S, around 540,000 people annually, most of these from metastatic disease.

Imagine buzzing the skin over an internal wound with an electrical device and having it heal over just a few days – that’s the promise of new nanochip technology that can reprogram cells to replace tissue or even whole organs.

It’s called Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), and while it’s only been tested on mice and pigs so far, the early signs are encouraging for this new body repair tool — and it sounds like a device straight out of science-fiction.

The prototype device, developed by a team at Ohio State University, sits on the skin and uses an intense electrical field to deliver specific genes to the tissue underneath it. Those genes create new types of cells that can be used nearby or elsewhere in the body.

Researchers describe combining a “jumping gene” with CRISPR enzymes to deliver a a package of DNA to precise addresses in the E. coli genome.

Synthetic polymerase is a small step along the way to mirrored life forms.