For more than a decade, Penn Medicine clinical research nurse Joanne Shea has had a front-row seat to the groundbreaking research underway in the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies. As Abramson Cancer Center patients volunteer to participate in clinical trials of investigational treatments, often at a time when they have an incurable cancer that is resistant to conventional treatments, Shea does her part to advance the science.
Shea is part of the team at Penn Medicine that is now expanding into CAR T cell therapy for hard-to-treat solid tumors, including glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. The treatment extracts a patient’s own immune cells, genetically modifies them in a specialized lab, and then reinfuses the engineered cells into the patient to target and destroy cancer cells, and received FDA approval in 2018.
“It’s totally different from bedside nursing, and I just find it fascinating,” says Shea, whose job involves administering these novel treatments to patients, assessing them in follow-up visits, collecting and entering data, and more. “We’re dealing with cutting-edge technology here, and it’s exciting when you see that something is working. We’ve treated patients who were extremely sick and without other options, and to be able to witness their return to normal life cancer-free is amazing. I love having it happen right in front of my eyes.”
Throughout Penn Medicine and the Abramson Cancer Center, dozens of on-the-ground clinical trial support staff help execute the team science that brings research discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside. In the case of CAR T cell therapies that were pioneered at Penn and continue to be ripe areas for innovation, renowned scientists including Center for Clinical Immunotherapies (CCI) director Carl June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Bruce Levine, the Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy, and David Porter, the Jodi Fisher Horowitz Professor in Leukemia Care Excellence, lead the research vision. To achieve that vision, the quiet work of staff members behind the scenes is vital to moving the science forward.
The CCI’s Clinical Trials Unit recently received Penn Medicine’s Innovations in Clinical Research Operations Award, which recognizes “groups or individuals who build systems that improve how we conduct clinical research at Penn Medicine.”
“I really have to give resounding kudos to our team of research nurses and research coordinators because coordinating CAR T cell therapy is very complex,” says Lester Lledo, the unit’s director. “The patients are very complicated, they’re very sick, a lot of them have late-stage disease, and they’re being treated in a trial that’s also very complex. On top of that, our staff also need to be very creative and innovative because we are often traveling in uncharted territory with these first-in-human trials.”
This story is by Nicole Sweeney Etter. Read more at Penn Medicine News.
