What are some of the
most promising research being done to treat acute lymphocytic leukemia?
So ALL is incredibly exciting right now in terms of treatment
and in terms of our understanding of the disease in science.
One of the biggest breakthroughs is we realized we don't really need lymphocytes.
Those cells that we make for that, the blood cancer is one of the B.
And what that means is we can start to target
these cancer cells in a variety of ways and kill them, not in the scattershot
approach where traditional chemo, we kind of kill all fast growing cells.
With this, we can be much more targeted
in our therapy and especially in setting of immunotherapies.
So I think of this in two different ways.
Number one, we try to use traditional chemos, but we target.
So what we can do is say, does the cancer cell express a certain target?
And then ALL, a lot of times they do, though, express things called CDX like 20.
All these different numbers will throw around.
And if your cancer cell expresses that, well, then we can use antibodies that go
finding anything with that marker on it and then put the cancer directly in there.
And what the nice thing about that
is we're not affecting anything that doesn't have that target on it.
The second thing that is a major, major breakthrough in is actually always in
the news is we're using the immune system against these cancers.
So there's two ways we do this.
Number one is kind of like what we just talked about, which is you use immunotherapy,
so you get a target and then you tell your body to go attack it.
And that is either done by what we call bispecific.
So you have a little thing that grabs on to the target and then
grabs on to one of your own body's T cells and brings it to kill it.
And the second thing is a technique we call CAR T,
And so this we take some of your own body's T cells, the immune cells
out of your out of your body.
Take them to a lab and we teach them how to kill the cancer.
And then we put them back into your body and allow them to go
kill off the cancer themselves.
