Immunotherapy: unlocking the body’s immune system to fight diseases,
is one of the most exciting and promising areas of cancer research and
treatment. In the coming year, City of Hope will be opening more
clinical trials using an especially powerful type of immunotherapy
focusing on T cells. Many of these trials will focus on blood cancers.
Chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR,T cell therapy is a promising
approach to immunotherapy being studied at a handful of centers
nationwide, including City of Hope, the only center currently offering
clinical trials in California. The trials use a similar approach
tailored to each cancer: Patients have their T cells collected from the
blood then they are replicated in the lab. The cells are then modified
using a lentivirus, a virus that encodes the T cells with specific
antigen receptors, allowing them to recognize proteins found on cancer
cells. This, researchers say, should trigger the immune system to fight
cancer.
Trials using this type of immunotherapy are
currently underway at City of Hope for acute lymphoblastic leukemia,
lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In the next year, City of
Hope plans to roll out trials in brain cancer, breast cancer metastases
to the brain, acute myeloid leukemia, and multiple myeloma.
Researchers hope that the T cells will be long-lived in the body and
reproduce allowing them to be effective against the initial cancer,
and ready should any relapse or recurrence arise.
“When you get a cold or infection, the immune cells specifically track down and ride the body of infected cells,” said Stephen J. Forman, M.D.,
chairman of the Hematologic Malignancies and Stem Cell Transplantation
Institute and director of the T Cell Immunotherapy Research Laboratory
at City of Hope.
Cancers are frequently able to develop properties that trick the
immune system into believing they are part of the body itself, but this
time, scientists believe they can jump a step ahead of the cancer and
restore the body’s natural defenses.
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