Inside the Cure Factory
Voice of America
Step inside the therapeutics cell manufacturing facility for a behind-the-scenes look at how Seattle Children's Therapeutics is creating CAR T-cell products for children with cancer.
A key part of the CureWorks mission is to increase the number of clinical trials around the country so more kids have access to these promising treatments closer to home.
Expanding trials not only benefits patients and families by keeping them in their communities, it helps to improve the quality of research findings by diversifying and expanding the amount of data, which will accelerate the pace of discovery. We believe a collaborative effort among leading children’s hospitals is the best way to advance our understanding of pediatric cancer, and will result in treatments with fewer side effects, better remission rates and, ultimately, more kids growing up to realize their full potential.
Cancer immunotherapy is based on reprogramming a patient’s own cells to recognize and combat cancer cells.
Similar to a blood donation, some of the patient’s immune cells are harvested from the body.
We isolate the T-cells, which are the key disease fighting cells, from the harvest and ship them to our Clinical Cell Manufacturing facility.
We then genetically engineer the cells to express a new protein (the CAR, chimeric antigen receptor) that enables T-cells to recognize and fight cancer cells.
When the CAR T-cells are ready, the patient may receive a conditioning therapy to enable T-cell engraftment and enhance function.
The newly engineered CAR T-cells are shipped back to the patient’s healthcare team. Through infusion, the patient receives their cell therapy and is carefully monitored for therapeutic effect and any adverse side effects.
Learn more about the value of immunotherapy and its promise for patients.
Step inside the therapeutics cell manufacturing facility for a behind-the-scenes look at how Seattle Children's Therapeutics is creating CAR T-cell products for children with cancer.
Learn how immunotherapy research at Seattle Children’s is paving the way to become the next great advancement in cancer treatment.
Harper's cancer is in remission, thanks to a CAR T-cell immunotherapy clinical trial. Today she is a joyful, boisterous child.
At just 3 years old, Leah Faith Soner has spent most of her life fighting a deadly disease. Then she enrolled in a specialized CAR T-cell therapy trial through CureWorks, a collaborative effort among a handful of top-tier pediatric hospitals to offer better outcomes for kids with the most resistant forms of cancer.
Four academic children's hospitals have joined forces to create a research collaborative that will make it easier for their patients to access immunotherapy clinical trials and for their researchers to find good candidates for therapies.
For years, the foundations of cancer treatment were surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Over the last two decades, targeted therapies like imatinib (Gleevec®) and trastuzumab (Herceptin®)—drugs that target cancer cells by homing in on specific molecular changes seen primarily in those cells—have also cemented themselves as standard treatments for many cancers.
Your immune system helps keep track of all the substances normally found in your body. Any new substance the immune system doesn’t recognize raises an alarm, causing the immune system to attack it. CAR T-cell therapy is a promising new 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. CAR T-cell therapies are sometimes talked about as a type of gene or cell therapy, or an adoptive cell transfer therapy.
Food and Drug Administration advisers on Wednesday enthusiastically endorsed a first-of-its-kind cancer treatment that uses patients’ revved-up immune cells to fight the disease, concluding that the therapy’s benefits for desperately ill children far outweigh its potentially dangerous side effects.