Using killer cells to fight cancer: researchers are promoting CAR therapy

Biontech boss Ugur Sahin, Medigene boss Dolores Schendel, patient Emily Whitehead

From the point of view of many experts, the novel immunotherapies mark a new era in cancer treatment,

Frankfurt Emily Whitehead has celebrated her birthday twice a year for the past nine years. Once because she has gotten a year older, and once because she has been cancer-free for another year. The now 16-year-old American owes this to a revolutionary therapy concept that researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis helped to achieve a breakthrough a few years ago.

At the age of five, Emily developed acute lymphatic leukemia (ALL), the most common and very malignant blood cancer in childhood. When conventional therapy no longer worked, the doctors at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia decided in 2012 on a revolutionary new treatment, which at that time was still in an early, experimental stage: a so-called CAR-T therapy.

In this case, CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptors. With these artificial receptors, certain immune cells of the patient, the T cells, are equipped and in this way programmed to dock on cancer cells and destroy them.

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