Driving Revolutionary Advances in Cancer Treatment

For patients like Randolph, the CAR T-cell therapy process begins with a simple in-clinic blood draw. The blood is then frozen and sent to a lab, where the CAR is added to the T-cells. A few weeks later, the patient checks into the hospital and receives some mild chemotherapy to neutralize immune cells that might attack the CAR T-cells. The reengineered blood is then infused back into the patient over several hours, and doctors watch closely for side effects including cytokine release syndrome, an inflammatory response from the immunotherapy that can cause inflammation in the brain. The treatment currently is approved only for patients who have failed other forms of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but researchers are hopeful it will eventually become a more frontline standard of care.

“You can genetically engineer out all the bad parts of the HIV virus and put in all the cancer-fighting parts,” says CU Cancer Center member Clay Smith, MD, director of the Blood Disorders and Cell Therapies Center at UCH. “We do that because the HIV virus is very efficient at infecting the T-cells to turn them into CAR T-cells. Having grown up at the time when HIV was first discovered and was a tragic epidemic, it’s been amazing to watch how they can take something that devastating and turn it into something not only harmless, but actually beneficial to people with cancer.”

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