CAR T-cell Therapy

T cell therapy is a new technique being used to try and treat patients with serious diseases, including cancer. The reason this new technique is so revolutionary is because it is customizable to each patient and their issues. I think that this is an incredible breakthrough and could be a major step on the path to curing cancer. So how does it work? According to the National Cancer Institute, the doctor will harvest T cells from a patient’s blood and reprogram the T cells to attack the cancer that is within the patient. Once the cells are reprogrammed, “Millions of the CAR T cells are grown in the laboratory and then given to the patient by infusion”. This treatment is really interesting to me it is not just some lab manufactured drug, it is the body’s own mechanisms and cells just being altered slightly. 

The Seattle Children’s Hospital also uses this technique and they provide a little more detail on how the new technology works, specifically in treating cancers like acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The way that the T cell is modified is by adding recombinant DNA. This DNA creates a new receptor on T cells so that when they are put back in the body they can bind to cancer cells and flag them for destruction. This T cell therapy is specifically called “CAR T-cell therapy” because “the receptor that’s made on the new T cells that attack the cancer is called a Chimeric Antigen Receptor. The CAR T-cell treatment does not just end after the infusion. The newly inserted T cells are tagged so that they can be followed as they move throughout the body. This is really important because the doctors want to be able to follow the cells to see if they are working properly. If there does happen to be a problem then the doctors can use a drug called “cetuximab” which recognizes the tag and destroys the CAR T-cells. 

According to the website of The Seattle Children’s hospital they “treat more types of relapsed or refractory childhood cancers using T-cell therapies than any other facility”. They also do all of their CAR T-cell treatments in labs onsite so that they can quickly help patients. I hope that in the future they could potentially provide other hospitals with this technology in order to treat even more patients. I think this type of treatment could be the cancer treatment of the future due to how it is personalizable and doesn’t have the awful side effects that chemotherapy and radiation has. This treatment is costly, but so are most cancer treatments. It is something that will only decrease in cost if there are changes to our healthcare system. CAR T-cell therapy is not perfect but It one of the best options I have ever seen and I think it could help a lot of people who are not responding well to normal cancer treatment.