The Car-T cell revolution: reprogramming lymphocytes against cancer • FRANCE 24 English
some science news for you now and there has been a significant advancement in the fight against cancer it’s called CTI cell therapy and it’s a rapidly developing cellular immunotherapy strategy that holds great promise it’s trying to combat cancer by harnessing a patient’s own immune system we’re going to talk about all this now with Julia Seager who joins me on set Julia first of all just break it down for us what is immunotherapy first of all well immunotherapy is a new type of cancer treatment as you said it’s considered to be one of the greatest breakthroughs in the last decade it won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2018 uh and it’s a targeted therapy uh if you will it’s a targeted therapy and the way it works is that when so I have to explain to you how the immune system works so the way the immune system works is that when your body is faced with a pathogen let it be um Let It Be bacteria viruses or allergens our bodies have several lines of defenses right so first the first barrier is the skin of course uh and uh those pathogens if they do enter the body and maybe we can take a look at this uh at this uh which explains how the immune system works because I think you you will understand better jeie uh if we take a look maybe we can uh uh bring it up but uh the idea is really to modify certain cells of the patient so here you can see that if the body is faced with a pathogen uh it has several lines of defenses the first one of course is the skin but if the pathogen enters the body then the immune system takes over and kind of like a security checkpoint at the airport it’s going to scan every cell and it’s going to be able to identify whether the cell is healthy or unhealthy if it’s unhealthy it’s given the order to destroy it now the problem Genie with cancerous cells is that the immune system can’t recognize it as being an an unhealthy cell the reason why is because it has a camouflage capability thanks to a protein called pdl1 so the immune system can’t recognize it as being something unhealthy that it needs to be destroyed and immunotherapy the whole goal is to be able to awaken that immune system and so scientists have found two ways of Awakening the immune system what are they well there are several ways and indeed two of them I’d like to uh touch on that first you can inject what we call uh monoclonal antibodies so you’ve heard of it because of covid-19 this is how Donald Trump for instance was one of the treatments that he received for co9 the way it works is that you’re going to create antibodies in the lab that are capable of recognizing uh the cancerous tumor but also of attaching binding to that tumor and kind of like sticking a flag in it it’s going to either those antibodies are going to be able to get rid of the tumor or it’s going to induce an immunity uh reaction so it’s going to tell the the lymphocytes to come and destroy that tumor the second technique and this is what I wanted to tell you about today is car cell therapy it’s considered a revolution now here you’re going to take the the T lymphocytes of the patient you’re going to modify it in the the lab so that it’s it’s going to now have on its surface a molecule kind of like an antenna if you will that’s going to be able to recognize the cancerous cell and open it like a key and then destroy it so this is a huge breakthrough uh we have stunning results it’s only used at least here in France on two different blood cancers uh the first one is uh it’s used for adults and children alike with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and the second cancer is a diffused large cell b lymphoma uh and of course the goal is to be able to extend this type of therapy to other types of cancers juliia thank you so much it’s great to know that there are those incredible revolutions happening especially when it comes to something like cancer with the car cell Revolution thank you so much you Seager
There’s been a significant advancement in the fight against cancers, called CAR-T cell therapy. It is a rapidly developing cellular immunotherapy strategy that holds great promise. More information with FRANCE 24 Science Editor Julia Sieger.
#Science #cancer #treatment
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