CAR T Cell Therapy Gives Hope Where There Was None to People With Certain Types of Blood Cancer

"With CAR T cell therapy, T cells are taken out of the patient and educated outside of the body to recognize [cancer] cells," Matthew Davids, MD, a hematologist-oncologist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, tells SurvivorNet.

CAR T cell therapy reengineers disease-fighting immune cells to recognize and attack cancer cells. It has revolutionized the way doctors treat relapsed and resistant blood cancers, and the survival rates in these advanced cancers prove it.

CAR T-Cell Therapy: How It Works

To deliver CAR T cell therapy, doctors draw out the patient's blood, separate the white blood cells (including a type of disease-fighting immune cell called T cells), and return the blood back to the body. The cells go to a lab where biomedical engineers alter them to contain receptors (chimeric antigen receptors or "CAR"s) that recognize and attack proteins on the surface of cancer cells. It's like turning your own immune cells into targeted cancer drugs.

Related: Many More Patients Will Be Able to Access This Life-Saving Drug — Medicare Covers CAR T Therapy Nationwide

Lab technicians then multiply the cells so that there are plenty of them to put back into the patient. Doctors then get the souped-up T cells back into the patient's blood stream through an infusion.

CAR T cells have the potential to wipe out all of the cancer cells in the body. And they may stick around in the blood stream for months. That's why this treatment can lead to long-term remission for several different kinds of blood cancer.

Who Gets CAR T Cell Therapy

CAR T cell treatment is FDA approved for patients with certain types of leukemia and lymphoma. But, it's not the first treatment doctors will try.

Related: What Are Blood Cancers

Typically, people with large B cell lymphoma (LBCL), mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), or patients up to 25 years old with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) can get CAR T cell therapy if their condition has relapsed or become resistant to other treatments.

The immune-boosting therapy is in clinical trials for other blood cancers.

Dr. Sid Ganguly Talks About CAR T’s Potential to Treat Many Other Blood Cancers

"You will be seeing many more diseases where CAR T will become commercially available," Sid Ganguly, MD, Deputy Director of Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Kansas Medical Center, tells SurvivorNet. He adds that people who don't fall into the categories for which the FDA has approved CAR T cells may be able to enroll in clinical trials that offer the treatment.

CAR Ts Make Big Impact in Previously Untreatable Blood Cancers

The clinical trials that led the FDA to approve CAR Ts for these three groups of relapsed or treatment-resistant patients had dramatic results. More than 80 percent of the children and young adults with ALL went into remission after treatment with CAR Ts. In the LBCL trial, half the patients went into complete remission and another 30 percent went into partial remission. Most recently, in the trial that won FDA's approval to treat MCL with CAR T's, more than 60 percent of patients went into complete remission and another 20 percent achieved partial remission.

Dr. Robert Orlowski Describes CAR T’s Potential in Other Blood Cancers

Prior to CAR T-cell treatment, people with these types of advanced and aggressive blood cancers may not have had other options.

As far as researchers know now, CAR T-cell therapy is a one-time treatment. "When the CAR Ts are re-infused, you don't have any additional chemotherapy afterward," Robert Orlowski, MD, PhD, a professor in the department of lymphoma/myeloma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer, tells SurvivorNet. "Many of these patients who were quite sick at the beginning feel better after this than they did after any prior therapy they've had."

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