CAR T-cell Therapy
Your immune system works by keeping track of all the substances normally found in your body.
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Any new substance the immune system does not recognise raises an alarm, causing the immune system to attack it.
CAR T-cell therapy (Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy) is a way to get immune cells called T cells (a type of white blood cell) to fight cancer by changing them in the lab so they can find and destroy cancer cells.
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CAR T-cell therapy is also sometimes talked about as a type of cell-based gene therapy because it involves altering the genes inside T cells to help them attack the cancer.
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T cells are taken from the patient's blood and modified in the lab, by attaching a specific cancer cell antigen to T cells called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR). Large numbers of these CAR T cells are grown in the laboratory and are subsequently injected back into the patient by infusion.
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This type of treatment can be very helpful in treating some types of cancer, even when other treatments are no longer working. CAR T-cell therapy is used to treat certain blood cancers, and it is being studied in the treatment of other types of cancer.
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Many CAR T-cell therapies (and similar types of treatment) are now being studied in clinical trials, in the hope of treating many types of cancer.