CAR T therapy in 60 seconds
Dr Claire Roddie, Associate Professor at UCL and Consultant Haematologist at UCLH, explains CAR T cell therapy in just 60 seconds.
Transcript
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.
Transcript
The UCL CAR-T team programme continues to expand as an enormous pace.
So, you know, we've obviously started life as a very small outfit, led primarily by Martin Pule and Karl Peggs, and we've grown sort of exponentially.
We've now got lots of subgroups looking not just at lymphomas and leukaemias, but we've got a big myeloma dual-targeting CAR-T programme. We've got a lot of T-cell malignancy programmes in the pre-clinical stages and also, we've had a few clinical trials looking at T cell lymphoma. We've got one for TALL that's coming up and of course we haven't even talked yet about solid tumours
We've got a big sort of a portfolio and solid-tumour CAR-T cell therapy that's in evolution. We've got a lot of trials coming up for paediatric indications, neuroblastoma, and DIPG – that's Pontine Glioblastoma in children – so we've got those trials coming up.
On the adult side, we've got a glioblastoma multi-form study that will be coming up very shortly for adult patients with a devastating brain tumour. Liver cancer, prostate cancer, all in the offering.
So, I think the age of CAR T-cell Therapy is very exciting. There's lots of potential, and the UCL CAR T-cell programme continues to gain traction in the field. And I look forward to sharing results from all of these clinical studies when they come to fruition.
Understanding why CAR-T cell therapy works for some people but doesn't work for others
Whilst CAR-T cell is an effective treatment for some people with blood cancer, it doesn't work well for everyone. Dr Claire Roddie is exploring why this is to help make this treatment more effective.
