CAR-T-cell therapy is very promising but the salient quote here is this:
"You need a good target, and that's probably the biggest obstacle to this kind of therapy," Cohen said. "We found a good target in leukemias and lymphomas. In solid tumors, it's been a bit more evasive."
The target protein has to be exclusively associated with the type of cancer cell that the treatment is designed to kill. If it occurs in other types of cells, the results could be disastrous. Even successful immunotherapy treatments can destroy healthy cells, and researchers concede that achieving pinpoint accuracy remains a major challenge. Unfortunately, there have already been cases in which CAR-T patients have died.
This is always the problem. It's always hard to have pinpoint accuracy in biology, and hopefully we'll get better at it but it's a hard slog.
Also remember that while this is promising, remember that this approach is only going to work with surface-available targets. They won't work looking at cell-internal targets, which is obviously where a lot of cancer has gone wrong.
That seems to be the basic problem when dealing with cancer. As it is a core behavior of our body run amok, it is damn hard to stop it without also killing the patient in the process.
"You need a good target, and that's probably the biggest obstacle to this kind of therapy," Cohen said. "We found a good target in leukemias and lymphomas. In solid tumors, it's been a bit more evasive."
The target protein has to be exclusively associated with the type of cancer cell that the treatment is designed to kill. If it occurs in other types of cells, the results could be disastrous. Even successful immunotherapy treatments can destroy healthy cells, and researchers concede that achieving pinpoint accuracy remains a major challenge. Unfortunately, there have already been cases in which CAR-T patients have died.
This is always the problem. It's always hard to have pinpoint accuracy in biology, and hopefully we'll get better at it but it's a hard slog.
Also remember that while this is promising, remember that this approach is only going to work with surface-available targets. They won't work looking at cell-internal targets, which is obviously where a lot of cancer has gone wrong.