CAR T therapy in 60 seconds

My name is Claire Roddie. I'm a consultant haematologist. At the Cancer Institute there lots of different teams working on ways to try to improve treatment of cancer. I belong to a department that manufactures immune treatments to target cancer.

There were some seminal pieces of work that were done that really sort of revolutionised the way that we think about cancer. And one of those was the development of car T cell therapy. It's already revolutionised how we treat leukemias and lymphomas, you introduce a new gene into a patient's immune cells. And that new gene allows those cells to go off and seek the cancer cells. It's perhaps a less toxic way of treating cancer because you're specifically targeting the cancer cells only.

 

It beggars belief to think of where we'll be in 10 years from now, there's a lot of very promising work going on to bring these therapies to a broader range of cancers. And hopefully the Cancer Institute will be right up there bringing these therapies to patients.