CAR-T Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Leukemia Cure? Patient Still Cancer-Free 11 Years After Innovative Treatment

AHA Publisher — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:22:07 +0000

Lorie Johnson via CBN News – Doug Olson may be 75 years old, but he feels great. He’s still cancer-free 11 years after he potentially faced death from a blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia. At that time, his doctors informed him that the treatments he had been trying we not working. “Terrified is probably the best word to describe it,” Olson told CBNNews. Feeling he had nothing to lose, Doug agreed to an experimental treatment developed at the University of Pennsylvania called CAR-T therapy. It uses the patient’s own immune system, specifically the T-cells. Olson said the process of gathering those cells took about three hours. “Your blood comes out of one arm, goes into a machine that takes out your white cells and then the rest of your blood goes back in the other arm,” he said. Scientists then take the cells they removed and add receptors to them that allow the cells to bind to invading cancer cells and kill them. These modified T-cells are then multiplied in a lab and then infused into the patient. “We used my own white cells to kill the cancer cells, but it was brand new, they’d never done it before in humans,” Olson explained. “I’m sort of an eternal optimist. I figured what the heck, it worked in mice, maybe it’ll work in me.” Indeed it did. Just five weeks after receiving the treatment, Doug’s doctor announced good news. “He said, ‘Doug, we can’t find a single cancer cell on your body,'” Olson recalled. His success paved the way for thousands to be treated with CAR-T therapy. Now, more than a decade after being one of the first patients to try the therapy, Olson is still cancer-free, a remission so remarkable it was highlighted in the medical journal Nature. “We feel pretty good about using the word, ‘cure’ now,” Olson said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved CAR-T therapies to treat blood cancers like lymphomas and leukemias as well as multiple myeloma. Ahmed Galal, MD, FRACP, MSc, is a cellular therapy specialist, hematologic oncologist, and hematologist at Duke Blood Cancer Center in Durham, North Carolina, who treats patients with CAR-T therapy. “Basically it’s a game-changer,” he told CBN News. Dr. Galal said CAR-T therapy is usually administered at academic medical centers, like Duke, after other treatments failed. He said patient results are pleasing. “Their outcome is about 45-percent for five years. Now, these are the latest studies showing the duration of response is actually extending and is not coming down,” he said. “So I think eventually this will be a cure.” While CAR-T therapy has proven successful for certain types of blood cancers, it has not shown to be effective against other more common cancers, but that could change. Cancer researchers are currently conducting trials to treat some of the deadliest forms of the disease including pancreatic and lung cancers as well as brain tumors. “This is only the start,” said Dr. Galal. “CAR-T will expand more and more to different indications including more leukemias including actually other types of cancer in the solid tumor.” So while cancer is America’s second leading cause of death behind heart disease, cancer deaths have actually fallen by more than 30 percent since 1991. Health experts say the decreased death rate is due to better prevention, such as not smoking, increased screenings, like mammograms, and treatments, such as CAR-T therapy. To read the original article click here.

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Researchers Engineer Cells to Destroy Malignant Tumor Cells but Leave the Rest Alone

AHA Publisher — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 07:00:04 +0000

McMaster University via EurekAlert – Researchers at McMaster University have developed a promising new cancer immunotherapy that uses cancer-killing cells genetically engineered outside the body to find and destroy malignant tumors. The modified “natural killer” cells can differentiate between cancer cells and healthy cells that are often intermingled in and around tumors, destroying only the targeted cells. The natural killer cells’ ability to distinguish the target cells, even from healthy cells that bear similar markers, brings new promise to this branch of immunotherapy, say members of the research team behind a paper published in the current issue of the journal iScience, newly posted on the PubMed database. The experimental treatment is an alternative to chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T, which received FDA approval in 2017. The engineered T-cells used in CAR-T therapy are highly effective against some blood-borne cancers but cannot distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous cells, so while they offer important benefits, they are not uniformly applicable to all forms of cancer. In patients with solid tumors, the T-cells can cause devastating, even lethal side effects. The team behind the research wanted a treatment with the same power as CAR-T, but which could be used safely against solid-tumor cancers. They first propagated natural killer cells taken from the blood of patients with breast cancer. Such cells perform a similar function to T-cells in the immune system. The researchers then genetically modified them to target specific receptors on cancer cells, successfully testing the CAR-NK cells in the laboratory on tumor cells derived from breast cancer patients “We want to be able to attack these malignancies that have been so resistant to other treatments,” says lead author Ana Portillo, a PhD candidate in the Department of Medicine. “The efficacy we see with CAR-NK cells in the laboratory is very promising and seeing that this technology is feasible is very important. Now, we have much better and safer options for solid tumors.” “These CAR-NK cells are a little bit smarter, in a way, in that they only kill the enemy cells and not good cells that happen to have the same marker,” says Ashkar, Portillo’s supervisor and a Professor of Medicine at McMaster. “These cells have a sober second thought that says, ‘I recognize this target, but is this target part of a healthy cell or a cancer cell?’ They are able to leave the healthy cells alone and kill the cancer cells.” Portillo and Ashkar’s 12 co-authors, most associated with McMaster’s Department of Medicine and its Immunology Research Centre, include McMaster’s Bindi Dhesy-Thind (Associate Professor, Oncology), who provided blood samples from patients being treated for breast cancer in her clinical practice at Hamilton Health Sciences’ Juravinski Cancer Centre. “These are very exciting results, as to date the benefits of immunotherapy in breast cancer have lagged behind that of other malignancies,” she said. “These engineered CAR-NK cells are an important step towards having a viable immunotherapy option in this large group of patients.” Ashkar says there is good reason to believe the technology would have a similar effect on solid tumors associated with lung, ovarian and other cancers. The next step in moving the therapy toward clinical use is to conduct human trials, which the researchers are now arranging. To read the original article click here.

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