5 years of struggle with blood cancer and thanks to CAR-T therapy he was saved in just 6 months.
“A Patient survives four years after terminal brain tumor“. This is the headline that the magazine left us a few days ago. ‘Nature’. What was made possible thanks to Treatment with CAR-T cells (Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CART).
What is car-T cell therapy?
CAR-T cell therapy, whose full name is chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (abbreviated CAR-T), It involves modifying immune cells T lymphocytes (white blood cells) in the laboratory.and a sick person so that they are able to recognize and fight, in the case of cancer, tumor cells.
These CAR-T cells have been proposed good results for blood cancers, but never for solid tumors. Until now. Since last week Stanford Universitypublished an essay in the USA in which eleven patients, most of them minors. they had incurable brain tumors. Everyone was treated with these cells and in all cases The size of the tumor decreased significantly.. Moreover, as we have already said, in one of the cases all traces of him were erased.
Fran beat blood cancer in 6 months after 5 years of struggle thanks to card-t treatment
A few months ago he underwent this treatment here in Spain. Franthanks to Chris Cancer Foundation. Fran has already been with follicular lymphomaor what is the same: a blood cancer.
The years in which, as he confesses to us in “Midday COPE” “I found myself very scared because the symptoms were a little hard to detect.” Fran recalls that “at first we thought it was the flu, but after several hospital visits and x-rays, They discovered it was cancer”
During all this time, Fran underwent many different courses of treatment. At first there were the usual ones: chemotherapy, radiation therapy…They even did bone marrow transplant. Seeing this none of this workedthey tried new, somewhat more specific treatments. But neither one nor the other.
That’s when his doctor told him about another treatment, CAR-T. At that time for your cancer type It has not been approved in Spain.. But after many months of struggle together with the Cris Contra el Cancer Foundation, they managed to make this treatment also useful. So, in May of this year, he finally received CAR-T cells.
- 6 months later Fran is a cancer survivor