Approval for 'future of cancer therapy' new treatment could make 80% of cases ... trends now
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A new one-off treatment pioneered by Australian scientists has been approved in the fight against cancer, which some experts believe could pave the way to curing 80 per cent of cases within two to three decades.
The therapy, called CARVYKTI, helps treat patients with multiple myeloma and will be used when other lines of treatment fail.
Around 1,100 Australians lose their lives to multiple myeloma each year, which develops in the blood through plasma cells in bone marrow.
The treatment has now been signed off on by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which is the first time in Australia that a CAR-T cell therapy has been approved for use against a common cancer.
CAR-T cell therapy is a personalised immunotherapy where blood is extracted so that doctors can re-engineer the patient's own T cells to kill cancer inside the body after it is reinjected.
T cells are part of your immune system which fight infection, and CAR-T cells are designed to find and attack BCMA, a protein found on the surface of nearly all multiple myeloma cells, according to Janssen Biotech and Legend Biotech who developed the new treatment.
A new one-off treatment has been approved in the fight against cancer which some experts believe could pave the way to curing 80 per cent of cancers within two-to-three decades
CAR-T cell therapy is a personalised immunotherapy where blood is extracted so that doctors can re-engineer the patient's own T cells to kill cancer inside the body after it is reinjected
Blood withdrawal from patients takes between three to six hours before the sample is sent to a special laboratory where structures called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs)
