More than 30,000 patients have undergone CAR T cell therapy—once considered fat-fetched—since it was developed by immunologist Carl June and his team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
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(From left) Bruce Levine, Stephan Grupp, Tom Whitehead, Emily Whitehead, Kari Whitehead, Carl June, and David Porter.
(Image: Daniel Burke)
Emily Whitehead was just five years old when she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2010. Over the next two years, she relapsed twice, and her medical team recommended hospice, as there were no other options.
Believing a cure was still possible, her parents enrolled her in a Phase 1 clinical trial for CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cell therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and in April 2012, Emily became the first child to receive this treatment, which reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer.
Despite high risks, Emily survived the treatment, and her cancer went into remission. More than a decade later, she is still cancer-free.
The CAR T cell therapy that Emily received, developed by immunologist Carl June and his team at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first gene therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017.
However, when June first came to Penn in 1999 to establish a human immunology program, immunotherapy was not considered a promising approach for treating cancer, forcing June to rely on private funding to initially fund his lab.
Today, more than 30,000 patients have undergone CAR T cell therapy, which is approved to treat a variety of blood cancers such as lymphoma, leukemia, and multiple myeloma, and is being investigated for use in a variety of other diseases and conditions, including solid tumors such as glioblastoma; autoimmune diseases, such as myasthenia gravis and lupus nephritis; and transplant rejection. Penn Medicine is currently running dozens of clinical trials involving CAR T cell therapy.
Once considered far-fetched, CAR T is now saving and extending lives and redefining what’s possible for patients who once had no options at all.
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