Tampa Bay Times: Coming soon at two Tampa Bay area hospitals: a cancer treatment that could replace chemo

By Justine Griffin

Benjamin Gilkey, 7, with his mother, Laura Gilkey, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2014. He was treated at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hosptial in St. Petersburg until his death in February. Doctors say CAR-T treatment might have helped "Benji" had it been available at the time. "It will draw more people to Johns Hopkins," Laura Gilkey said. [Photos courtesy of Laura Gilkey]

A new cancer treatment that could eventually replace chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants — along with their debilitating side effects — soon will be offered at two of Tampa Bay’s top-tier hospitals.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August approved the first ever Chimeric Antigen Receptor Therapy, or “CAR-T cell therapy,” for children and young adults up to age 25 suffering from leukemia and other blood and bone cancers. And just this week, the agency approved the same immunotherapy for adults with large B cell lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg will be the first and only pediatric hospital in Florida to become a certified treatment center. Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa also will be among the first in the country to offer the same therapy on adults with blood cancers like B cell lymphoma.

CAR-T uses white blood cells from the patient’s immune system and re-engineers them in a lab to target and wipe out cancer cells. Specialists draw the cells from the patient’s blood and “re-program” them to go after blood and bone marrow-type cancer cells instead of the flu or any other bacteria or infection they would normally attack, said Dr. Frederick Locke, a principal investigator for the experimental therapy at Moffitt.

During the laboratory process, scientists work with receptors, which are molecular structures in cells that tell them what to do based on messages they receive in the bloodstream. In this instance, they add a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, to each T-cell. The CARs are programmed to target a specific protein, called CD19, found on cancer cells.

Then the newly trained T-cells are infused back into the body to do their job.

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