CAR T-cell Therapy

Immunotherapy to treat cancer diagnosis is the future of cancer therapy, and on the forefront of immunotherapy is dendritic cell and T-cell therapy. Dendritic cells are the primary antigen presenting cells of the immune system and T-cells are the backbone of the acquired immunity. One specific type of T-cell therapy that I decided to focus on for my blog post today was the CAR T-cell therapy. Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy. This type of therapy works by taking blood from a patient who has tumor cells within their body and taking out the T-cells from that blood sample. Then a T-cell receptor (what allows the T-cell to recognize foreign things in the body) will be created to recognize the cancerous cell type. The modified T-cell would then be put back into the patient. Now, the patient has T-cells that can recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells faster.

In order to understand the current status of CAR T-cell therapy, I read two articles about current research happening in order to see the effectiveness of CAR T-cell therapy. One article I read mentioned that CAR T-cell therapy worked very well against a certain type of blood cancer (Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma) but that there were drawbacks. One of the major drawbacks is that many patients developed therapy-related severe cytokine release syndrome and neurological toxicity limit. These mostly occurred in patients with a large tumor burden and it did seem that patients with a lower tumor burden. This other article that I found showed that CAR T-cell therapy may be useful in types of cancer outside of just blood cancer. Glioblastomas have been seen as a good potential target for CAR T-cell therapy (one of the most aggressive brain cancers).

I think that T-cell and dendritic cell therapies are the future of cancer therapy because they are actually fighting the thing that is trying to be eliminated. The drawback of chemotherapy is that it targets all cells that are replicating. This means that normal cell that replicate often are also being targeted. Which therapies such as CAR T-cell therapy, there is a specificity to the target of elimination that is not occurring with traditional chemotherapy. Because of the harmful side effects including the cytokine response, I believe that we are still far away from using these therapies as common medical treatment to cancers. However, new biological technology is exciting, and we should continue to fund and support innovative therapies like these.