Why has it been so hard to use CAR-T cells to treat solid tumors? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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For the first time CAR-T cells, a highly activated type of immune cell, have been used with some success to treat stomach cancer, a so-called solid tumor. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says solid tumors have been especially difficult because they create a type of toxic environment surrounding them.

Nelson: What you tend to see is T cells when they arrive there, they act like they're exhausted and it's a tough, tough environment. I suspect in the end if we can slow the cancer cell down in some way from this behavior and then find out who else is contributing to this evil soup around it and stop those kind of things then immunotherapies will probably be more effective. CAR-T cell therapy is going to try and generate so many T cells that will recognize it that you can overcome the fact that many of them are not going to do very well when they show up. That's the logic here.         :28

Nelson says that as our understanding of the microenvironment around tumors grows, many more ways to modify and render it more susceptible to treatment will emerge. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.