From OHC

July 17, 2019

Immunotherapy, treatments that help the body’s own immune system attack cancer, is advancing at a rapid pace. As this ground-breaking approach continues to evolve, doctors at OHC, the region’s leading experts in the treatment of adult cancers and blood disorders, are at the forefront, aggressively using this approach to help patients fight cancer. And they’re excited about the direction in which this approach is heading.

One of the most significant milestones in the evolution of immunotherapy is the ability to harvest cancer-fighting cells from a patient, modify them, and return them to the patient to attack cancer cells. The most successful use of this process is chimeric antigen receptor therapy (CAR-T). CAR-T for adult patients was introduced to the Cincinnati region by OHC and is still only available at OHC for adults with cancer.

CAR-T is a process through which we re-educate the body’s own T-cells to recognize and kill cancer cells, and help guard against recurrence. We’re using CAR-T for patients with blood cancers, and we’re seeing promising results. Our first patient’s scan after treatment showed a dramatic improvement. To witness this kind of response to treatment is something all cancer doctors hope to see.

Now national researchers are studying a process similar to CAR-T to treat solid tumors.

A recent article in Forbes reported on a clinical trial in which immune cells, called tumor infiltrating lymphocytes, were taken from a patient’s breast cancer tumor, grown in a lab to increase the number of cells, and injected back into the patient – similar to the CAR-T process. The patient had previously received several treatments including hormone therapy and chemotherapy, but nothing stopped her breast cancer from growing. After the immunotherapy treatment, all of the patient’s tumors disappeared and 22 months later, she was still in remission. The process is also being studied in clinical trials for colorectal, bile duct and cervical cancer solid tumors.

Immunotherapy is one of the most promising approaches to cancer since the introduction of chemotherapy, and OHC is part of this new frontier in medicine thanks to our robust clinical trials program. We are testing many new treatments through trials and offering cancer patients a new sense of hope.

For more information about immunotherapy at OHC, please visit here. You can also contact OHC for a second opinion at 1-800-710-4674 or ohcare.com.