How does infection risk relative to CAR-T treatment factor into therapy? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

CAR-T therapy, where someone’s own immune cells are trained to go after their cancer, has now been shown to confer a heightened infection risk, and risk of death from infection, for some recipients. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson says there’s a shift in who might receive this form of cancer treatment. 

Nelson: You can imagine 2 extremes. If you are a young person with an incredibly aggressive lymphoma, threatening your life on a week to month basis and you've been through ten kinds of treatments, including bone marrow transplantation, and your lymphoma is still chasing after you the value of these car T cells if they can control your lymphoma that's what you're going to want and you'll cross that next bridge related to the infectious risk when you come to it. I think it's going to mean the logic of who you treat, how you treat, when you treat and with what you treat for these diseases it's going to become very complicated.               :32

Nelson says seek the opinion of those who use CAR-Ts a lot. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.