This Experimental Cell Therapy Could Give Cancer Patients Cheaper Treatment
There’s a security force of nearly a billion immune cells—called T cells—patrolling the inside of your body. Its job is to look out for any suspicious-looking characters, like a nasty cold virus, and get rid of them. They're also useful in the fight against cancer by way of an innovative treatment called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.
Unlike conventional cancer treatments that rely on cancer-killing drugs or radiation, this process takes a patient’s own T-cells and genetically engineers them to track down and kill tumor cells. But one major problem with this treatment is that you can’t take these engineered T cells and use them for someone else since they run the risk of getting rejected, similar to organ transplants. Luckily, scientists might have found a workaround that might end up saving cancer patients money as well.
Researchers at Toronto General Hospital and the University of Toronto have developed a therapy that uses a double-negative T cell, a unique type that manages not to trip any alarm bells in your immune system and get rejected when transplanted. In a new study published on Friday in the journal Science Immunology, these CAR-T cells were effective in fighting cancer in Petri dishes and in mice with transplanted tumors derived from human tissues. Most importantly, these cells weren’t rejected, a revolutionary finding that could make using CAR-T cells a more effective and accessible therapy for many cancer patients.
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