How CAR T-cell therapy treats certain cancers and autoimmune diseases

When the US Food and Drug Administration approved CAR T-cell therapy in 2017, it created new options for patients who had exhausted other treatments. The therapy genetically alters a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer and is intended for those who have not responded to chemotherapy or bone-marrow transplantation, or whose cancer has returned.

It is approved for some blood cancers — including multiple myeloma, certain subtypes of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia — and more recently for metastatic melanoma and a rare sarcoma. The process begins by collecting a patient’s T cells through apheresis.

Those cells are genetically modified to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) that let them detect specific antigens on cancer cells, then multiplied and infused back into the patient. These re-engineered T cells act as a living drug: they attack cancer cells, continue to multiply, and can persist in the body.

United States

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