CAR T-cell is a personalized cell therapy that is used primarily now for patients with blood cancers.

“We’re taking living immune cells, often from our patient, and reengineering those so they can fight the cancer and find it in the patient’s body,” said Dr. Krish Patel, director, Lymphoma Program at Swedish. “We take those engineered CAR T-cells, reinfuse them into our patient, and they will grow and multiply and create a small army of themselves to attack that patient’s cancer.”

Most CAR T-cell therapy starts with collecting immune cells from the patient with a special filtration process. The collected cells are then sent to a company for genetic engineering. A patient will have chemotherapy before the CAR T-cell infusion, which allows the right conditions for the cells to thrive.

The hope is that CAR T-cell therapy will be a one-time treatment to control the disease long-term.

“Patients have to be generally healthy,” Dr. Patel said. “They generally have to have a good support system to be able to go through this process.”

Researchers at Swedish are currently researching cellular therapy to treat solid tumors, such as melanoma, in the future and possibly lung cancer, sarcoma and head and neck cancers. Swedish also recently started doing trials of CAR T-cell therapy in autoimmune diseases, including lupus and MS.

“Research has really led us down this pathway of precise cell engineering, so it’s really fortunate to be able to apply this in diseases I treat but also in those that my colleagues do,” Dr. Patel said.

Dr. Patel says the future of cancer treatment is personalizing therapies and finding the best balance for how well treatments work and limiting side effects.

“Cell therapy is a really great example of that,” he said. “It takes a lot of understanding to be able to design these treatments.”

To learn more about CAR T-cell therapy and other treatments, visit the Swedish Cancer Institute website.

Sponsored by Providence Swedish.

Segment Producer Suzie Wiley. Watch New Day Northwest at 11 a.m. weekdays on KING 5 and streaming live on KING5.com. Contact New Day.

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