When immunotherapy professor Carl June started working with CAR T cells, he was not focused on treating cancer.<\/p>\n
At the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, June studied bone marrow transplantations for patients with radiation exposure during the Cold War, thinking about how to expand T cells \u2014 cells that attack foreign invaders in the body as part of an immune response \u2014 outside of the body. Later, during the AIDS epidemic, he began using those cells to treat HIV-1 in his lab at the Naval Medical Research Institute.<\/p>\n
June\u2019s idea was that a patient\u2019s T cells could be removed from their body, grown in the lab using certain proteins, and returned to the body to continue fighting against HIV-1. Bruce Levine \u2014 who now serves as the Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy \u2014 later joined June in his lab.<\/p>\n
But when the pair came to Penn in 1999, they pivoted to looking at CAR T-cell applications in cancer research \u2014 specifically, leukemia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Department of Defense does infectious disease work, but they don\u2019t do cancer research,\u201d Levine explained. \u201cWe move up to Penn \u2014 now we can start clinical trials in cancer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Get the DP delivered straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n
Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe used the lessons from HIV, but just changed the CAR design and then changed its targeting so that it would target leukemia-associated molecules,\u201d June added. He now serves<\/a> as the director of Penn Medicine\u2019s Center for Cellular Immunotherapies.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2010, the two treated their first patient suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia with CAR T-cell therapy. Two subsequent patients in the clinical trial also showed promising results.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe had treated three patients,\u201d June said. \u201cAll three responded, but we had no more money.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The field of cancer immunotherapy had, for over a decade, been in what Levine described as \u201cthe dark ages of gene therapy,\u201d where skepticism ran rampant, and funding was hard to acquire. The team, with dwindling funds, went ahead and published the results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very unusual in an end-stage cancer trial to have three out of three patients respond,\u201d June added. \u201cWe had smoking-gun good evidence that the CAR T cells did it.\u201d<\/p>\n Their work, including the subsequent treatment of pediatric patients, paved the way for the United States Food and Drug Administration\u2019s approval of the first CAR T-cell therapy in 2017.<\/p>\n Now, researchers at Penn are looking at strengthening the effect of CAR T cells \u2014 known as \u201carmored\u201d CAR T cells \u2014 in blood cancers.<\/p>\n