Doctors perform India’s first allogenic CAR-T surgery
Mumbai: CAR-T therapy, an emerging field of cancer therapy, is taking big strides in India.
The country’s first allogeneic CAR-T therapy procedure, where T-cells were harvested from a donor and infused in a patient, was performed by Mumbai-based oncologist Dr Vijay Patil at the PD Hinduja Hospital.
This brings new hopes for patients with solid organ tumours. Currently, the CAR-T option is available for specific form of blood cancer since an indigenously developed innovation, NexCar-19, by ImmunoACT, is approved for treatment.
“Since the allogenic CAR-T cells are not yet prepared in India, we had to import them and ensure that they were carefully transported while maintaining a constant temperature of -80 degrees Celsius. After the successful completion of this procedure, we are now looking forward to offering this cutting-edge treatment to hundreds of other such patients in India,” said Dr Patil.
CAR T-cell therapy is a way to get genetically modified T-cells (or immune cells) to destroy cancer cells in the patient’s body.
Dr Patil says the CAR T-cell therapies presently approved by the US FDA and our homegrown NexCar19 only work against the cancers that have specific ‘locks’ or antigens, such as CD19 and BCMA.
“These adoptive cellular immunotherapies are therefore also restricted to using only the patient’s own (autologous) αβ (Alpha-Beta) T-cells, or those of HLA (human leukocyte antigen)-matched donors. If infused in an HLA-mismatched patient, they can potentially lead to a life-threatening graft-versus-host disease (GvHD),” he noted.
To circumvent these challenges, for the first time in India, Patil says an allogenic procedure was performed using γδ (Gamma-Delta) T-cells, which are a ‘master key’ possessing the capacity to recognise a wide array of antigens, and activating direct killing mechanisms by bursting the cancer cells, also leading to the secretion of proinflammatory molecules known as cytokines, which leads to a further cascade of immune response recruiting other cells, including the αβ (Alpha-Beta) T-cells.
Source – ETHealth World
