Chinese researchers have come up with a cheaper and easier way of delivering a highly specialised, personalised cell therapy to treat blood cancers and other serious diseases.
This new method is much easier to programme than the conventional approach and is available at a fraction of the cost, according to experts in the field.
The treatment, known as CAR-T, is a type of immunotherapy that has taken off in recent years and has also shown promise in treating other conditions such as asthma and autoimmune diseases. However, these cell therapies are difficult to produce and deliver to patients, and they are expensive.
Now, a group of Chinese medical experts has proposed a solution to these drawbacks using gene therapy tools. They reported that they had managed to produce anti-cancer cells directly inside the human body and, for the first time, had used them to treat four patients with multiple myeloma – the second most common form of blood cancer.
Currently, the cost of a single treatment is estimated to exceed one million yuan (US$139,200).
The study, led by researchers from the Institute of Haematology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology’s Tongji Medical College Union Hospital in Wuhan, was published in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet earlier this month.
