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Recruiting immune cells for cancer intervention is the future, but it will still take a while to get there. >> Over seven years that followed the therapy, 12 p
by adamredwoods 2y ago
Recruiting immune cells for cancer intervention is the future, but it will still take a while to get there.
>> Over seven years that followed the therapy, 12 patients died due to relapsed neuroblastoma. Among the seven that survived beyond this point, five were cancer-free when given the CAR T-cell therapy but had previously been treated for neuroblastoma using other approaches and were at high risk of relapse. All five were disease-free at their last follow-up, between 10 and 15 years after the CAR T-cell therapy, although the team note they may already have been cured when the therapy was administered.
- jandrese 2y agoThe problem is that cancer is your own cells, so immunotherapy solutions are always going to be balanced on a knife point. If you make the tiniest mistake it is Lupus.
- lr4444lr 2y agoWouldn't that likely have a better prognosis than most cancers?
- meowfly 2y agoA family member of mine is going through keynote 522, which is a clinical trial that combines 3 chemos and an immunotherapy prior to surgery. The five year survival rate for stage 3 triple negative breast cancer is normally about ~60% but the clinical trials show with immunotherapy it exceeds 80%. So the survival rates you see online aren't capturing the progress we are making with these drugs. Hashimotos seems worth the risk. An interesting aside is that the patients in the clinical trials who had adverse reactions to immunotherapy and came off the medication had higher survival rates than patients who stayed on it. The hypothesis is that stimulating an immune system overreaction also means it was also highly effective against the cancer.
- adamredwoods 2y agoInteresting theory, but not in my experience. My wife died of MBC and she had lots of reactions. Anecdotally, the pembro + chemo may have given her an extra year, she did well on it.
- jandrese 2y agoLupus is not generally associated with "good prognosis".
- mbil 2y agoI wonder if they could do two phases. Like first engineer T cells that mark the target cell but don’t kill it. And then, if the marked cells are sufficiently scoped to cancer cells, use the same targeting mechanism for cancer-destroying T cells.
- adamredwoods 2y agoMarking them is the challenge. Cells have expressions that we can engineer chemicals to bind with, but sometimes the cancer cells have no expression (Triple negative breast cancer for one). It just mutates and divides faster. This is why chemo works well, it is uptaken by cells that divide faster, like cancer, and hair, mouth cells, etc. But chemo is general, it doesn't specialize. So thus, the new chemo called ADCs (anti-body drug conjugates), are really nice. They target AREAS and release generally.