CAR-T cells are an expensive form of cancer treatment, but other techniques may soon supplant them, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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CAR-T cells, a highly activated immune cell, have been used to treat a solid tumor, stomach cancer, for the first time. Yet the fact remains that CAR-Ts are expensive and time consuming to produce. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson says there are newer techniques emerging that utilize much of the same strategy.

Nelson: There are some protein engineering tricks where you can take the recognition function that you've genetically engineered on a CAR-T cell, you can put it in an antibody like protein like drug and you can create it in such a way that it will go grab onto one of the T cells in the body bring it there and have the T cell kill it. That obviates the need to collect T cells, expand them outside of the body, genetically modify them, don't need to do all those things and I actually think that may be the future of this style of therapy.   :30

For now, Nelson predicts both techniques will continue to be further developed and utilized clinically. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.