CAR T-Cell Therapy Saves Family
- Helen Wynne Hughes, 32, in England was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2018 and was told to “prepare for the worst.”
- Lymphoma is a cancer that is typically classified as either Hodgkin or Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.
- CAR T-Cell therapy is a type of cancer treatment that works to attack the cancer cells.
Lymphoma Diagnosis
Hughes was diagnosed with lymphoma during pregnancy after a scan showed a large mass on her chest. She began chemotherapy and then gave birth just 10 weeks later to a healthy baby girl. Thankfully, she qualified for CAR T-cell therapy. Hughes called it her “last hope.” Undergoing this therapy led to a full recovery.
Dr. Catherine Diefenbach, a Medical Oncologist at New York University Langone Health, spoke to us in an earlier interview about the possibility of lymphoma relapses. She said, “There are over 68 kinds of lymphoma. For this reason, it’s very important that if you have a diagnosis of lymphoma, you’re treated by a lymphoma specialist.”
Related: CAR T-Cell Therapy: What You Should Know About Side Effects
She went on to explain, “And we hope for all of our lymphoma patients that the first therapy you receive will be your last therapy. That is, that we can treat you and cure you with first line therapy. In general, non-Hodgkin lymphomas are divided into aggressive or indolent lymphomas. And the approach to these lymphomas is very different. Aggressive lymphomas are treatable and potentially curable. Indolent lymphomas are managed and don’t always require treatment. However, they are not curable by conventional means of describing curability.”
Could Your Lymphoma Come Back? What Happens When You Relapse
Understanding CAR T-Cell Therapy
This mom of three was saved thanks to some incredible medical advancements in cancer treatment known as CAR T-Cell Therapy. Dr. Stephen Schuster, a Medical Oncologist at Penn Medicine, explained this type of therapy in a previous interview.
“Once you transduced the patient’s T cells and this is done by taking the T cells outside the body, bringing them to the lab, using viral vectors to introduce these genes, and then giving the cells back to the patients and then they boom go to the tumor, expand, and amazingly wipe the tumor out. It’s called cellular therapy. Or you’ll hear the term CAR T-cell therapy. CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor modified T-cell therapy,” said Dr. Schuster.
Related: CAR T-Cell Therapy: Making Your Body a More Efficient Cancer Fighter
“And so what we were doing was making a gene that coded for chimeric receptor against this CD19 protein on the malignant B cells, and introducing into the normal T cells, giving them back those T cells to eradicate the cancer. Amazingly, it worked.”
Why CAR T-Cell Therapy is So Exciting
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