Think of cancer treatments and you may automatically think of chemotherapy, radiation or surgery. But a new immunotherapy treatment available in Hawaiʻi, CAR-T therapy, involves extracting, supercharging and reinjecting your own T cells, a type of white blood cell.
Pediatric and adult patients can be treated locally through a program offered by the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center and Hawaiʻi Pacific Health.
"It is a special type of treatment where we can use what we call a viral vector to deliver a gene that codes a specific receptor into the patient's own immune cells, which in this case is CAR-T cells so it's T cells, so that it can then recognize a very specific marker on the cancer cell," said Dr. Stephanie Si Lim of HPH's Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children.
She said the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval came in 2017, but CAR-T cells have been studied for over 30 years. CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor.
Si Lim said it is a big deal to offer this type of treatment to Hawaiʻi patients, who now don't have to travel to the continent. Setting up the program took about 2.5 years; the first patient was treated in August 2023.
So far, one pediatric and two adult patients have received CAR-T therapy through the new Hawaiʻi program.
"CAR-T therapy itself as a field probably has over 1,000 clinical trials available around the world for different types of cancer. So currently, there's six FDA-approved products right now that are all treating blood cancers, so lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, etc.," Si Lim told HPR.
"The clinical trials available out there is for the different types of cancers, so specifically like breast cancer, lung cancer, kind of all different types."
This interview aired on The Conversation on Feb. 29, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
