A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests an experimental immune system treatment that uses the patient’s own cells might be an effective treatment for deadly skin cancers called melanomas.

A 52-year-old man with recurrent melanoma, which had already spread to a lung and a lymph node in his groin get the experimental treatment. He was a lucky man in the end because its melanoma disappeared and didn’t come back during a period of two years. The man was given an infusion of its own, fortified immune system cells called CD4+ T cells.

Scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle selected CD4+ T cells from a sample of the patient’s white blood cells. These cells were specifically programmed by the body to attack cancer. The researchers isolated those types of cells and cloned them in their lab. After several months, they infused 5 billion of the cloned cells back into the patient’s body.

“What we and others have thought might be important is that we need to give patients more of these cancer-fighting T cells which may be present in low frequency in most people,” researcher Cassian Yee, MD,  told WebMD. “You can do that either by giving them a vaccine or, in our case, we took the cells out and grew them and gave them back to him.”

“It's taken us many years to get to this point,” he added.

The treatment had no side effects. But researchers say this treatment will not always work because cancers try many different tactics to defeat the immune system, the same source noted.

T-cell therapy is a promising one although it’s hard to say if all the patients given the treatment will respond as well as the man whose cancer was halted.