Experimental Cancer Therapy Holds Great Promise — But at Great Cost
By Meghana Keshavan,
STAT
| 08. 23. 2016
Soon after she received the treatment, Karen Koehler’s brain swelled. Her blood pressure plummeted. As she fell into a coma, her husband and sister sat at her bedside — urging the doctors to keep pushing her farther along the razor’s edge between life and death.
Koehler was undergoing a promising — and terrifying — experimental therapy that her oncologists hoped could rid her body of cancer entirely. It’s called CAR-T therapy, and it works by engineering the patient’s own immune cells to attack cancer.
One of the hallmarks of CAR-T: It has to nearly kill you if it’s going to save you.
The treatment induces such sudden and severe side effects that it can take a small army of top specialists to keep patients alive while their newly engineered immune systems attack their cancer cells. The result: CAR-T remains so risky, so complex, and so difficult to manage that experts warn it’ll be years before it’s available to most patients who would stand to benefit — even though two drug makers, startup Kite Pharma and pharmaceutical giant Novartis...
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The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...