Mayo Clinic, University of Minnesota develop ‘robocop’ stem cells to fight cancer
By JEREMY OLSON , STAR TRIBUNE
August 19, 2017 – 6:08 PM
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota say they’re on the brink of a new era in cancer care — one in which doctors extract a patient’s white blood cells, have them genetically engineered in a lab, and put them back to become personalized cancer-fighting machines.
The so-called CAR T cellular therapies are expected to receive federal approval this fall for certain rare blood cancers — B-cell forms of lymphoma and leukemia. But scientists at the Minnesota institutions hope that’s just the first step that will lead to better treatment of solid tumor cancers as well.
“This is really the first approval of a genetically modified product for cancer therapy,” said Dr. Jeffrey Miller, deputy director of the Masonic Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota. If the proof of concept works, he said, “we might be on the right track to get away from all of that toxic chemotherapy that people hate.”
Participating in industry-funded clinical trials, the Minnesota researchers hoped to determine if patients with leukemia or lymphoma would be more likely to survive if their own stem cells were extracted to grow cancer-fighting T-cells that were then infused back into their bodies.
One analysis, involving trials by Kite Pharmaceuticals at Mayo and other institutions, found a sevenfold increase in lymphoma patients whose cancers disappeared when they received CAR T instead of traditional chemo-based treatment.
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