Making CAR T-cell therapy more accessible for people with blood cancer

CAR T-cell therapy is a type of cancer treatment that harnesses the power of our immune system to destroy cancer cells. This treatment involves taking T cells (cells that help to protect you from infection and disease) from a patients’ own blood, modifying them in a lab and then giving them back to the patient to seek out and destroy the cancer. Although CAR T-cell therapy is effective in people with more aggressive types of blood cancers that no longer responds to treatment, it is very expensive. Estimates suggest CAR-T costs the NHS around £280,000 per patient with a large part of the cost of CAR T-cell treatment coming from how complicated it is to make. Currently the process has to be carried out in many careful steps, and it takes approximately 3-6 weeks to make CAR T-cells. This means that there are cases where people can’t get their CAR-T treatment because their cancer has become too severe while they were waiting.

Dr David Coe and his team at CoED Bioscience, working with University Hospital Wales are developing a process so CAR T-cell therapy is quicker to make and more accessible for people with blood cancer. This new method combines four key steps in making CAR T-cell therapy into one simple process using one chamber, which means the treatment can be made much faster. This apparatus uses new techniques which researchers hope will make the CAR T-cell therapy more effective at seeking out and destroying the cancer cells. The researchers plan to evaluate this new method so they can improve how well it works and develop it for a commercial market.

If this new way of producing CAR T-cell therapy is successful, it could revolutionise treatment for many people with blood cancer. The fast production of CAR T-cell therapy could transform how CAR T-cells are made, enabling faster and more cost-effective CAR-T treatments. This could mean many more people could receive life-saving CAR T-cell treatments before it is too late.