T-Cell Therapy

T cell therapy is a new form of immunotherapy that uses genetically engineered T cells to fight disease.  T cell therapy is still developing and at the moment it is mainly used to fight forms of cancer.  The therapy has shown promising results so far, however serious side effects have also been associated with this form of therapy.  Due to the adverse side effects associated with T cell therapy, it is not widely used in the medical community.  I believe that T cell therapy could be important in reducing the amount of deaths in people with cancer.  It is great that scientists are researching new ways to treat cancer, chemotherapy can be such a long and draining process.  If scientists can perfect T cell therapy and reduce the amount of results that have side-effects, then this could be the future of cancer treatment. 

A study was recently done on patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) that were treated with CAR T-cell therapy.  CAR T-cell therapy works by removing a patient’s T-cells, then modifying them to recognize and attack cancer cells.  Then, the modified T-cells are injected back into the patient.  Results of this therapy showed that more than 90% of patients had no disease progression after 12 months.  While these results are promising, a 12-month follow-up revealed the survival rate of patients was down 19% from the projection.  Severe and life-threatening side-effects due to the T-cell therapy were found in 15-30% of patients.  Side-effects included cytopenia (reduction in certain blood cells), infections, neurological events and cytokine release syndrome.  Furthermore, some T-cell therapy patients were shown to have relapses.  I think at this point in the T-cell therapy development, the risks far outweigh the rewards.  For people with other medical problems, the side-effects of the T-cell therapy could kill them. 

While T-cell therapy is promising, it may not be accessible to wide groups of people.  Some estimates say that T-cell therapy could cost up to $375,000 for just one treatment.  This is a lot of money for one treatment, some people will not even be cured by T-cell therapy and others could relapse after being cured initially.  Having 2 or 3 treatments of T-cell therapy could cost upwards of $1 million, this is just too much money for most people in the world.  This insanely high cost coupled with the adverse side-effects associated with T-cell therapy is why the treatment is not used by more people.  I hope researchers can make the treatment more cost effective and reliable so it can be distributed to more people.