Professor Cameron Turtle
Plans are now afoot to expand the new Cancer Cellular Immunotherapy Service at RNSH. “We need to take the good results we get with CAR T-cells on some blood cancers and extend those to other blood cancers and solid tumours. There is also potential to use CAR T-cells in other non-cancer diseases, in particular autoimmune diseases,” Cameron says. “We have had great results with the first iteration of CAR T-cell products, which have regulatory approval and are now available. But now the effort is in doing research to try to improve how we engineer these cells and make them cheaper, easier to give, and much more effective.” Cameron says it is important to make sure that patients who need approved CAR T-cells can get them.
“From here, we can look to the future with research pipelines and developing new products,” Cameron says. “Now is the time to be putting support into research, because it’ll pay back in spades.”
the usual treatments didn’t work. These genetically modified CAR T-cells are now a standard part of treatment for a number of different blood cancers.” While outcomes are improving, Cameron says there are still downsides to the treatment. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to try to improve the ease of delivery of these products, how expensive they are to make and what sort of side effects people have,” he says.
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