Researchers in the Netherlands found that a therapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells slowed the progression of metastatic melanoma.
By Kaitlin Sullivan – NBC News
European researchers announced Saturday that a new treatment for advanced melanoma was more effective than the leading existing therapy in a Phase 3 clinical trial.
The treatment, which uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight the cancer, has some similarities to another type of treatment that has proven to be highly effective for blood cancers, called CAR-T therapy.
CAR-T therapy involves harvesting a patient’s T cells and modifying them in the lab to turn them into cancer fighters, then infusing the cells back into the patient. The personalized treatment was first shown to be successful a decade ago in certain leukemia patients; it’s now also used for lymphomas as well as multiple myeloma.