STAT : declared in A first: All respond to CAR-T therapy in a blood cancer study

How it worksThe treatment, called CAR-T therapy, involves filtering a patient's blood to remove immune system soldiers called T cells. CHICAGO — Doctors are reporting unprecedented success from a new cell and gene therapy for multiple myeloma, a blood Cancer that's on the rise. The second study was done in the U.S. by Bluebird Bio and Celgene, using a cell treatment developed by the National Cancer Institute. In a second study of nearly two dozen patients, everyone above a certain dose responded. It's the second fastest growing cancer for men and the third for women, rising 2 to 3 percent per year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

CAR T cell therapy cancer treatment face-off

It's a type of cancer immunotherapy, or a therapy that harness the body's immune system to take on cancer cells. Short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, CAR-T treatment takes a person's own cells, removes them from the body, re-engineers them, and then puts the cells back in the body where they can attack cancer cells. That's for Kite's CAR-T treatment for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (more general than DLBCL). And in July 2016, another CAR-T company, Juno Therapeutics, said four people in its clinical trials had died, all from cerebral edema. In May, Kite Pharma revealed that one person had died in a clinical trial for its late-stage CAR-T therapy from cerebral edema, a condition in which excessive fluid causes the brain to swell.


Focus on T-cell therapyOne approach is the so-called adoptive T-cell therapy, which involves removing immune cells from the body and genetically arming them. "If that step succeeds, the approach would enlarge the arsenal of T-cells suitable for adoptive T-cell therapy," Elfriede Nößner states. "But there are ways to support the immune system in recognizing and combating cancer cells." Scientists are working to find new treatment possibilities, and have been concentrating on the body's own immune system for some time. She and her team were therefore searching for a different way to improve the defense provided by the immune cells.


collected by :Lucy William

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