A woman from Florida who went around her doctors to get an experimental cancer treatment that 'gene edits' immune cells saw her lung tumors shrink by 50 percent in just one month.

Kathy Wilkes, 71, endured eight rounds of chemotherapy and an operation after she was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer in 2018.

But despite the treatments, the disease had spread from the pancreas and into the lungs within a year of her diagnosis.

Desperate to beat the cancer, Wilkes started searching for new treatments online — and quickly stumbled across a case study in a prestigious online research journal about a treatment that had already made a 50-year-old woman with colon cancer 'disease free'.

She got in touch with the doctors behind the study at Providence Cancer Institute in Portland, Oregon and after tests revealed her cancer had the same mutation — dubbed KRAS G12D — she was also offered the treatment.

Within a month her tumors had shrunk by half, and in six months they were down to 28 percent of their original size.

Wilkes is not yet cured, but the cancer has not grown since she received the treatment. She told NBC News: 'I knew that that was the trial that was going to save me, save my life. I just had that feeling.'

The tale was revealed in a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the same journal where the original case study she found was published.

About 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer every year, estimates the American Cancer Society.