Can a new method for developing CAR-T cells to treat cancer be expanded? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Making CAR-T cells from donor bone marrow already used to treat someone’s cancer helped rein in cancer recurrence, a new study shows. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins says this is one more place where an expansion of CAR-T capabilities is underway.

Nelson: There are off the shelf CAR-T cell preparations that some companies are trying to create. This one's interesting because it's tethered to the bone marrow transplantation. This approach, by selecting particular T cells, engineering in a particular way putting them in you didn't need as many. They hung around and they didn't cause graft versus host disease. They're pretty deliberately directed against the cancer itself so I think this is something that would be an adjunct to bone marrow transplantation. It's less and less fraught these days than ever before, which is why it's becoming so extensively used to treat sickle cell.     :29

Nelson says there has also been some progress in using the cells to treat solid tumors. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.