Cellular therapies at Roswell Park
We offer this cutting-edge treatment for several cancer types.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy uses your own living T cells (a type of immune cell) instead of drugs to destroy and control cancer cells. It involves collecting cancer-killing T cells from the patient’s blood, multiplying them in the laboratory, and returning them to the patient to jump-start the immune system’s attack against the disease.
One specific adoptive cell therapy, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, is proving beneficial against several blood cancers — including multiple myeloma.
How CAR T-cell therapy works
The first CAR T-cell therapy to receive FDA approval for use in patients with multiple myeloma was Abecma and now another, Carvykti, is available.
In these treatments, your immune system’s healthy cancer-killing T cells are collected through apheresis, a procedure that’s very much like donating blood. Your cells are re-engineered in a laboratory, where they are “taught” to attack a certain protein (antigen) that’s found on the surface of the myeloma cells — the protein called B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA). Then the T cells are multiplied until there are millions of them and returned to your body through a one-time intravenous (IV) infusion.