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Exciting new area of cancer treatment - CAR T-cell introduction

Submitted by jonathanrubi on Thu, 03/08/2018 - 20:54

Traditional treatment of cancer has always been based on invasive surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. However, with advances and molecular biology and biochemical engineering, immunotherapies, or therapies that use the patients own immune system to attack tumors has been gaining traction and shown a lot of promise. This generally works by the extracting a patients T cells through a process called leukapheresis and then genetically modifying those T cells to express a chimeric antigen receptor through the use of retrovirals and then injecting the modified T cells back into the body to bind tumor antigens. The modified T-cells are only injected into the patients body after their immune system is completely depleted. The most common antigen target of drugs furthest along in development is an antigen found on B cells called CD19.

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