Emerging Cancer Treatment is Exciting Scientists
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'Jurassic Park' actor Sam Neill put the treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney.
He stopped short of describing his remission as a miracle - the success, he said, was “science at its best”. Meanwhile, Prof Misty Jenkins, an immunologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (Australia's oldest medical research institute), describes CAR T-cell therapy as a "game-changer.” In brief, it's a treatment that supercharges the body’s immune system to fight disease.
CAR T-cell therapy is a highly personalized immunotherapy that genetically engineers a patient's own T-cells to detect and destroy cancer cells, primarily for advanced blood cancers. It has shown remarkable success in treating specific lymphomas, leukemias, and myeloma that have not responded to other treatments
Pioneered in the 1990s, the therapy has come to the fore in the past decade and four CAR T-cell therapies have been approved for use in Australia since 2018. All are for blood cancers. The success of those therapies is increasing enthusiasm among researchers and clinicians that CAR T-cell therapies - CAR for “chimeric antigen receptor” - will soon become a major weapon in the battle against cancer. It is now being tweaked to combat solid tumours, with promising early signs of success tempered by the difficulties in tailoring T-cells to find their target. The future may even see it become an injectable.
“It’s such an exciting time for cancer immunotherapy, because I really feel like we’ve just scratched the surface on what’s possible,” Jenkins says.