Runners and riders, jumpers and fallers in the race to CAR-T

Most treatment plans for cancer have been based on a combination of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and in the past decade, drugs such as trastuzumab and imatinib, which target molecular changes observed in cancer cells1. For patients diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a form of cancer that is marked by overproduction of lymphoblasts (immature white blood cells, also called leukemic blasts), which prevents the bone marrow from producing normal blood cells, chemotherapy remains the principal form of treatment2. Two recently developed drugs offer a potential new solution: chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, or CAR-T.

Cancer immunotherapy breakthroughs

In recent years, the field of oncology has made progress in immunotherapy, a method that uses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. One technique has been developed that enables a patient's own T-cells to attack tumors. Another technique extracts T-cells from the body, genetically alters them to improve their ability to target the specific cancer, and then reintroduces them back into the patient’s body3. These new methods are called CAR-T treatments. The extracted T-cells are modified so that they contain receptors, which are certain proteins that enable the T-cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells inside the body. The genetically engineered cells are then able to seek out cancer cells more efficiently4.