Finding a Cancer Killer | Breakthrough
NARRATOR: Working out of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. June has been developing a new technology to leverage the immune system's T-cells to fight and kill leukemia in mice. [squeaking]
CARL JUNE: Yeah. I have been through a long journey. So I was a physician. And then gradually, I came to the conclusion that I could probably help more people through my scientific laboratory efforts than actually seeing people one at a time in a clinic. And I tell my family now that my MD stands for mouse doctor.
NARRATOR: The immune system protects you from outside invasion. If a virus, bacteria, or fungus slips into your body, the immune system responds with a coordinated attack that kills the invader, and only the invader, leaving your body intact. [chittering] This is a T-cell. This immune cell's job is to kill infected cells before they cause more damage. In theory, T-cells can be extraordinarily potent against leukemia. But there's one problem. Since cancer is effectively part of your own body, the immune system sometimes ignores these rogue cells, allowing the cancer to spread unchecked. June and his team have worked tirelessly to find a way to get the immune system to recognize and destroy all of the cancer cells in the body.
CARL JUNE: The therapy we're developing is multidisciplinary. It involves leukemia specialists. David Porter is known around the world for his treating various kinds of leukemia. It involves immunology expertise, viral vector design expertise, and then the cell culture expertise that Bruce Levine knows more about than anyone in the world, I'm quite sure. OK. I'm a professor in cancer gene therapy. And I direct the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility. And what we do is to develop, manufacture, and test cell and gene therapies to fight cancer using the patient's own immune cells that have been genetically targeted to cancer. [humming]
A CAR T-cell is a T-cell that is genetically modified in a way that allows it to see and recognize a cancer cell. A "CAR" stands for chimeric antigen receptor. It's a molecule that is synthetic. We can put it into an immune cell and genetically change the immune cell to express the CAR molecule. That function of binding activates the T-cell. And it allows it to become active, to become a killer cell, and to kill the leukemia. [explosions] [yelp] [belch] [explosion]