Pediatric ALL CAR T-Cell Therapy

Seattle Children’s Hospital, Seattle, WA

Immunotherapy may be the most exciting area of research in childhood cancer today. In short, a patient’s T-cells are removed from their body, re-programmed to fight their particular type of cancer, and re-inserted into the body. Immunotherapy could potentially replace chemotherapy for some patients, or at least reduce the use of side-effect-causing chemotherapy. There are a few centers of excellence that are working on immunotherapy right now, and The B+ Foundation has provided multiple grants to Dr. Michael Jensen’s lab at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research at Seattle Children’s Hospital. In the initial group of patients, the doctors are seeing survival rates for relapsed leukemia increasing from 15% to 91%! Read the full article. The B+ Foundation has purchased a Nuance Imaging System and a Droplet PCR machine for the lab. Our contribution to this exciting work was described by a lead investigator as “game-changing!”