The Challenges with Cancer Trials | Breakthrough

ANDRE CHOULIKA: We didn't have any intention of injecting these type of vials to patient because we needed a lot of vials to be able to file our clinical trial application. And this was planned to be done with the University College London.

NARRATOR: Before any new medication or therapy is considered safe and effective, it must first be rigorously tested through clinical trials. These trials are fundamental in determining an experimental treatment's dosage and safety and to identify any possible side effects. At the University College London, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, Professor Waseem Qasim was working with Cellectis as the principal investigator, taking the universal CAR T-cells from the lab to trials.

Normally, this process can take over a decade, with nearly endless layers of approval. So our questions were what do you do if your patient is already so unwell that you can't collect cells; or has had so much chemotherapy that there's no white blood cells left to collect, that you think are going to be useful; how do you do this process in a way that can be done quickly and delivered back to the patient in a timely manner?

And the answer to that is perhaps being able to use a product, a cell product, that's been made beforehand, that can be given back to multiple patients. Now in order to do that, we have to overcome the barrier of transplantation, which means if I put my cells into a nonmatched individual, the cells firstly will want to react against that individual because they will know the individuals is foreign. And secondly, the person receiving the cells will try and reject them because they know the cells are not their own.

NARRATOR: In affiliation with Professor Qasim, Doctor Paul Veys works on the front line with patients who desperately need new cancer treatment options. I'll have treated well over 3,000 patients and at least 600 of those will have gone wrong. So there's a lot of patients that we lose. It's unsuccessful. You've got to be able to come in the next day. Even from our failures, we've learned lots. And if we hadn't gone through those failures, we wouldn't be having some of the successes we have today.

Has the chest always been good? He's not had any big chest infections? NURSE: No. It's not good. Let's warm it up. Sit forward again. Yeah. Perfect. OK. Big breaths.