Hi welcome to another ColdFusion video
According to the World Health Organization
16 percent of all deaths worldwide are from cancer about 9 million per year
The annual cost on the healthcare system is about one trillion dollars
Chances are you've probably known someone who's had cancer
Well today. There's good news. 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
Trained to kill. Right now there's a new cancer treatment the 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
Yeah, that's right Anna and Arielle. I met a guy his name was Robert 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 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 percent 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
The new treatment is called chimeric antigen
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 car-T treatment causes the body to recognize and fight the patient's specific case of cancer
Car-T 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 that's incredible. using the body's own immune system to fight cancer is called
Immunotherapy and car-T is the most promising form of this approach
The reason people are so excited about this is because it produced incredible results and patients where all other treatments fail 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
but had two points we checked her three months and now six months out from her treatment
She has 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
will behold
Cancer-free John remission, so I've been remission now for about 15 months
Every month it gets better and better my strength has come back stamina has come back
Basically, I'm back living a full life again. Enjoying things. I like to enjoy so it 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's 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 cells 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
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 clients 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
Think of it as a one-time treatment of a personalized medicine
I would ask you about that clinical trial a lot of questions people have around the durability of their 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 with it 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 them now while in the past
They have failed every possible therapy
The treatment has been tested extensively on both children and adults suffering leukemia with unprecedented rates of success
This includes stubborn cases of reoccurring cancer that failed to respond to traditional treatments
In one 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 3 months for a trial of 63 patients
Car-T 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 Kochenderfer 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
Lymphomas who until this point were virtually untreatable end quote
In other words this treatment cured patients that would otherwise have most likely died
Dr.. Steven Rosenberg chief of the surgery branch also at the National Cancer Institute
Mentions that in just the last few years progress of car t-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 Kettering Cancer Center was skeptical and initially thought that this treatment would be a boutique therapy limited
To a small defined patient group, 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
This is serious and hasn't fortunately 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 four hundred seventy-five thousand dollars
for the one-time treatment although
They're promising not to charge patients who don't respond within a month
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 tumors
The number of clinical trials testing car t-cells has expanded dramatically
From just a handful a number of years ago to over a hundred and Counting
Doctors are turning their attention to solid cancer tumors with talk of a super t-cell
Earlier this year doctors have now reported success in prostate cancer
The Car-T 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 it
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 Dagogo you've been watching cold fusion
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And I'll see you soon again for the next video cheers guys. Have a good one