ColdFusion - Promising Cancer Cure Hits the Market! [Car-T Cells]

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. According to the World Health Organization, 16% of all deaths worldwide are from cancer, about 9 million per year. The annual cost on the healthcare system is about $1 trillion. Chances are, you've probably known someone who's had cancer. Well, today there's good news.

Starting point is 00:00:27 There's been some rapid progress in the battle against cancer. It comes in the form of a new treatment, for aggressive types of cancer that can't be cured with chemo or radiation therapy. Train to kill. Right now there's a new cancer treatment that doctors say really works. And we're already seeing success stories here in San Diego. Yeah, 10 News Reporter Jessica Chen is in the newsroom with the treatment that trained cells to find and destroy cancer. Jessica?

Starting point is 00:00:52 Yeah, that's right. Anna Nareal. I met a guy. His name was robber and his cancer. Well, it just kept coming back. But he underwent this new treatment called CAR-T cell therapy. and within weeks he's cancer-free. Now here's a picture of what it kind of looks like.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Now this red, it's a red T-cell. It's trained to kill. And here it is attaching itself to the white. That's the cancer eventually killing it. The success rate has been above 83% in some trials. And the best part is it's just been approved by the FDA in the United States and has been trialed in selected hospitals around the world. In this video, we'll take a look.

Starting point is 00:01:29 The new treatment is called chimeric angiogen receptor T cell therapy, or CAR-T for short. In basic terms, the therapy uses the patient's own blood to create a kind of living medicine. After just one dose, the medicine will work for an extended period of time to seek out and destroy cancer. It sounds far-fetched, but I'll explain how it works in more detail later on in the video. The breakthrough here is as follows. Normally, the immune system fails to recognize cancer, and some studies suggest that the immune system even mistakenly protects cancer cells. Through genetic engineering, CART treatment causes the body to recognize and fight the patient's

Starting point is 00:02:13 specific case of cancer. CART cell therapy, I think, is quite likely to change the landscape for treatment of patients with blood cancer. It involves a genetic modification of a patient's immune system, such that the white blood cells, a specific white blood so called the T lymphocyte, is modified in such a way to attack and destroy cancer cells. It's very exciting. So basically it's extracted from the patient, modified, and then reinjected so your body can fight with its own body, I guess. That's exactly right. Wow, that's incredible. Using the body's own immune system to fight cancer is called immunotherapy,

Starting point is 00:02:52 and CAR-T is the most promising form of this approach. The reason people are so much, excited about this is because it produced incredible results in patients where all other treatments failed to work. Right now, the treatment has been approved for children with the most aggressive forms of leukemia, a cancer that spreads through the blood, but other approvals are close in the pipeline. At first, I was skeptical, but the more I researched into it, the more miraculous cases I found of the treatment working. We've checked her bone marrow for the possibility of disease at two points. We checked her three months and now six months out from her treatment. She has not

Starting point is 00:03:27 no disease whatsoever. Seems like the cells stick around for a long time. That actually might provide long-term disease control. That is, of course, the most exciting potential part. Scott was one of the first people to receive CAR-T cell therapy as a trial. He was at a point in his fight with cancer where he had no other options, but CAR-T gave him a chance. Michael Bishop is one of the doctors who provided care to Scott. To say them excited would be a major understatement. Next scan, lo and behold, cancer-free, you're on remission. So I've been remission now for about 15 months. Every month it gets better and better, my strength has come back, standards come back, basically I'm back living a full life again, enjoying

Starting point is 00:04:11 things I like to enjoy. So it's just absolutely been a miracle and I owe so much to the team at University of Chicago. So how does it work exactly? As mentioned earlier, the treatment is a custom living drug taken from the patient blood and fights cancer within the patient for extended periods of time. The treatment begins by extracting something called T cells from the patient's blood. T cells are a type of white blood cell that are integral to the immune system. They're naturally built to seek out and attack infections in the body. Next, these T cells are mixed with a disarmed virus that's engineered to produce a special kind of receptor on its surface.

Starting point is 00:04:49 These receptors are synthetic molecules that don't exist naturally. These newly engineered receptors allow the T cells to find, recognize and destroy cancer cells. They do this by attaching the artificially engineered receptors onto the surface of the cancer cells, injecting them with poison and destroying it. The scientists then grow millions of clones of these new T cells in the lab. The engineered T cells then multiply and live within the body providing long-term relief. Because these cells multiply, you never have to go in again for a top-up dose. dose. Think of it as a one-time treatment of a personalized medicine. I want to ask you about that clinical trial. A lot of questions people have around the

Starting point is 00:05:30 durability of the responses. How long are people actually staying with their cancer in check? What have you been seeing and what do you expect to see as the results mature? What we can infer is for patients that were treated in early smaller studies at the NIH, some of the patients are now approaching five years. These are patients that had no evidence of any cancer now while in the past they have failed every possible therapy. The treatment has been tested extensively on both children and adults suffering leukaemia with unprecedented rates of success. This includes stubborn cases of reoccurring cancer that failed to respond to traditional treatments. In one

Starting point is 00:06:14 early study all signs of cancer disappeared in 27 out of 30 participants. That's a 90% success rate. In another more recent study, there was an overall remission rate of 83% within three months for a trial of 63 patients. Carty cells have produced strong results not only in patients with leukemia, but also patients with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. For example, James Cochin-Durfer, medical doctor of the National Cancer Institute, states, quote, Our data is the first true glimpse of the potential of this approach in patients with aggressive lymphomers, who, until this point, were virtually, untreatable." In other words, this treatment cured patients that would otherwise have most likely died.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Dr. Steven Rosenberg, chief of the surgery branch, also at the National Cancer Institute, mentions that in just the last few years, progress with CART cells and similar approaches have greatly accelerated. Quote, in the next few years, I think we're going to see dramatic progress and push the boundaries of what many people thought was possible with these adoptive cell transfer-based treatments, End quote. Dr. Brent Jones of the Memorial Sloan Ketting Cancer Center was skeptical and initially thought that this treatment would be a boutique therapy limited to a small, defined patient group.

Starting point is 00:07:33 But what he's seen over the past years has made him change his mind. Quote, we have cohorts of patients who have been considered terminal and are now in durable and meaningful remissions with good quality of life for up to five years, so enthusiasm for this technology is now quite high, end quote. So, is this all too good to be true? Well, not quiet, but there are a couple of major downsides. The first one, there's a serious and potentially fatal side effect, swelling of the brain known as cerebral edema.

Starting point is 00:08:08 This is serious and has unfortunately led to some deaths. However, the problem seems to be extremely limited, and many of the other car T-cell therapies have reported no such instances of the complication. Now, the second downside is probably the most heartbreaking part. It's the price. Novartis, one of the first companies to have the commercial version of the treatment available, is charging $475,000 for the one-time treatment, although they're promising not to charge patients who don't respond within a month.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Some experts in the field say that the price will come down as the manufacturing process becomes standardized and argue that even at this price, it may not even be profitable for the company. But still, this is a point. of contention for me. But regardless, the research on CAR T cells is continuing at a swift pace, mostly in patients with blood cancers, but also in patients with solid tumours. The number of clinical trials testing CAR T cells has expanded dramatically, from just a handful a number of years ago to over 100 and counting. Doctors are turning their attention to solid cancer

Starting point is 00:09:14 tumors, with talk of a super T-cell. Earlier this year, doctors have now reported success in prostate cancer. The CART treatment is the first ever cell-based gene therapy now publicly available in the United States and the FDA calls its decision a historic action. And I could agree, unlike previous claims of revolutionary cancer treatments, this does look like it's going to be something truly historic. So in conclusion, although it's in its early stages and is quite expensive, I see this as a beacon of hope in the fight against cancer, the numbers and the success rate are hard to argue

Starting point is 00:09:49 So that's really it. I realized that this story isn't widely known to the general public, so I really wanted to shine a light on it and get people talking about it. So what do you guys think? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below. So anyway, thanks for watching. This has been Degogo. You've been watching Cold Fusion. Feel free to subscribe if you've just stumbled across this channel, and I'll see you soon again for the next video. Cheers guys. Have a good one.

ColdFusion - Promising Cancer Cure Hits the Market! [Car-T Cells]

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