CAR-T Cell Therapy for Fighting Cancer, Abbexa News
CAR-T Cell Therapy for Fighting Cancer
Recently, scientists have engineered cells from a patient’s own immune system to fight cancers. The treatment with the engineered immune cells, called CAR T-cell therapy, may work even better if doctors transplant a subset of immune cells known as memory T-cells, researchers reported February fourteen at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.
A single engineered memory T-cell was enough to replenish the infection-fighting capability of mice lacking T-cells, said Dirk Busch, an immunologist the Technical University of Munich. That finding indicates that very low numbers of the cells in the figure could be enough to protect human patients.
PET scans of a tumor before (left) and two months after treatment with CAR T-cell therapy (right) in a patients kidney. Chemotherapy had previously failed to shrink the tumor. Photo credit; Fred Hutch News Service
Stanley Riddell, an immunotherapy researcher at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, reported the finding. In preliminary clinical trials, CAR T-cell therapy using the memory T-cells eliminated cancer in twenty seven of twenty nine patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) for whom other treatments had failed. Gene edited CAR-T cells were also recently used to treat a baby with leukemia.
The therapy also melted away tumors in six of seven patients in whom cancer had spread from the bone marrow to other parts of the bod, and ten of eleven patients who had previously undergone CAR-T cell therapy with a mixed bag of engineered T-cells were in remission after being treated with just the engineered memory cells, Riddell reported. Only a few hundred to a few thousand of the memory cells were needed to melt a patient’s tumor, Riddell said, with the low doses lessening side effects of the therapy.
CAR-T cells are genetically engineered versions of T-cells, immune cells that prowl the assets and identify invaders, such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. For decades, researchers have been attempting to get cancer patients’ immune systems to kill cancer cells, avoiding the crippling side effects of treatments such as chemotherapy.
Recently, researchers have created CAR T-cells or “chimeric antigen receptor” T-cells that make proteins that permit the T-cells to track down and kill particular types of cells. Researchers liquidated T-cells from ALL patients and genetically engineered the cells to hunt and ruin cells that make a protein called CD19. Such cells include antibody producing B cells, which overgrow in patients with ALL and some other types of lymphoma or leukemia.
Engineered memory T-cells can persist in patients for at least fourteen years, Chiara Bonini of the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan reported. Such cells may “act as a living drug that can persist and react in a patient in case the tumor comes back.”
CAR-T Cell Therapy for Fighting Cancer, Abbexa News
CAR-T Cell Therapy for Fighting Cancer
Recently, scientists have engineered cells from a patient’s own immune system to fight cancers. The treatment with the engineered immune cells, called CAR T-cell therapy, may work even better if doctors transplant a subset of immune cells known as memory T-cells, researchers reported February fourteen at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.
A single engineered memory T-cell was enough to replenish the infection-fighting capability of mice lacking T-cells, said Dirk Busch, an immunologist the Technical University of Munich. That finding indicates that very low numbers of the cells in the figure could be enough to protect human patients.
PET scans of a tumor before (left) and two months after treatment with CAR T-cell therapy (right) in a patients kidney. Chemotherapy had previously failed to shrink the tumor. Pic credit; Fred Hutch News Service
Stanley Riddell, an immunotherapy researcher at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, reported the finding. In preliminary clinical trials, CAR T-cell therapy using the memory T-cells eliminated cancer in twenty seven of twenty nine patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) for whom other treatments had failed. Gene edited CAR-T cells were also recently used to treat a baby with leukemia.
The therapy also melted away tumors in six of seven patients in whom cancer had spread from the bone marrow to other parts of the figure, and ten of eleven patients who had previously undergone CAR-T cell therapy with a mixed bag of engineered T-cells were in remission after being treated with just the engineered memory cells, Riddell reported. Only a few hundred to a few thousand of the memory cells were needed to melt a patient’s tumor, Riddell said, with the low doses lessening side effects of the therapy.
CAR-T cells are genetically engineered versions of T-cells, immune cells that prowl the assets and identify invaders, such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. For decades, researchers have been attempting to get cancer patients’ immune systems to kill cancer cells, avoiding the crippling side effects of treatments such as chemotherapy.
Recently, researchers have created CAR T-cells or “chimeric antigen receptor” T-cells that make proteins that permit the T-cells to track down and kill particular types of cells. Researchers liquidated T-cells from ALL patients and genetically engineered the cells to hunt and demolish cells that make a protein called CD19. Such cells include antibody producing B cells, which overgrow in patients with ALL and some other types of lymphoma or leukemia.
Engineered memory T-cells can persist in patients for at least fourteen years, Chiara Bonini of the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan reported. Such cells may “act as a living drug that can persist and react in a patient in case the tumor comes back.”