Cancer: the CAR T technology.

 

CAR T is an adoptive cell transfer therapy. In short, doctors remove immune cells from a patient’s body, reengineer them to attack cancer, and then reinsert them in the patient.

The immune cells that doctors collect in CAR T therapy are called T cells. They take the T cells from the patient’s blood. Then, they genetically modify the T cells to produce special receptors on their surface…

These special receptors are called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). CARs are proteins that allow the T cells to recognize a specific protein (called an antigen) on tumor cells.

Doctors grow the engineered CAR T cells in a lab. Then they infuse the cells into the patient.

If everything works right, the CAR T cells multiply in the patient’s body. And, thanks to the engineered receptor, they recognize and kill cancer cells that have the antigen on their surfaces.

Doctors can engineer CAR T cells to recognize any antigen. But researchers look for antigens that are common on cancer cells but rare on normal cells. Then they let the engineered T cells do their thing.

The science is difficult, but the idea is simple. And it works…

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a Phase 1 trial using CAR T cell therapy in relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

ALL is extremely difficult to treat if it comes back after chemotherapy. With traditional treatments, these patients have less than a 10% chance of going into remission. In this trial, however, 90% of the 30 patients went into complete remission…

And the results lasted. Nearly 70% had no further signs of cancer after six months.

Cancer experts don’t throw around the word “cure” much. But many of the patients who received CAR T cell therapy are basically considered cured.