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Learn more about the value of immunotherapy and its promise for patients.
Preclinical Assessment of CD171-Directed CAR T-cell Adoptive Therapy for Childhood Neuroblastoma: CE7 Epitope Target Safety and Product Manufacturing Feasibility
National Cancer Institute
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.
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A Look at How CAR-T Cell Therapy Works
Associated Press
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first treatment that genetically engineers patients’ own blood cells into an army of assassins to seek and destroy childhood leukemia. Here’s a look at how the powerful CAR-T cell therapy works.
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CAR T-Cell Therapies
American Cancer Society
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.
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Novel Cancer Treatment Wins Endorsement of FDA Advisers
The Washington Post
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.
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In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia
The New York Times
PHILIPSBURG, Pa. — Emma Whitehead has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince.
It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.
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