Cancer Cure News: Why CAR-T Cell Therapy is a Promising Cure for Leukemia
CAR-T cell therapy may be the long-awaited effective cure for leukemia.
In August last year, the FDA finally approved CAR-T cell therapy treatment after an additional 50 more patients who had been subjected to the trial went into remission. Patented under the brand name Kymriah, CAR-T therapy treatment is now available to other children and young adults under the age of 25.
"Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy cure a little over half of people who develop cancer. But that means almost 600,000 Americans die of the disease every year. With the approval of CAR T, we're taking a first step toward a completely new approach to curing cancers that have been incurable,"opines Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD, chief of the surgery branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and one of the pioneers of the process to use a patient's own immune system to defeat cancer.
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CAR-T cell therapy is a type of cancer treatment that involves the process of using a patient's T cells, a type of immune system cell, and altering them in the laboratory so that they can attack the cancer cells. These cells come from the extracted blood of a patient, and a certain protein in these cells bind to a gene for a special receptor referred to as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR).
The innovative cancer treatment is no panacea at this point in time, though, as it is only approved for the treatment of ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia), specifically those patients aging between three and 25 years old and experienced relapse after conventional therapy failed to do the trick.
As leukemia is is a cancer of the blood, it is easy for the altered T-cells to fight and defeat cancer cells through blood transfusion. This explains why experts have been pushing for the use of CAR-T therapy treatment for this type of cancer first.
