DCI Now Offers Commercial CAR-T Cell Therapy
By: Julie Poucher Harbin, Senior Writer, DCI
In January 2018, Duke Cancer Institute joined a select group of medical centers authorized to offer a new type of immunotherapy for patients with certain types of relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Duke is currently one of two centers in the Carolinas and Virginia that are certified and trained to administer this treatment—chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, better known as CAR T-cell therapy, sold under the brand name Yescarta by Kite Pharma. Yescarta is the first and only CAR T-cell therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of adult patients with certain types of relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
This individualized gene therapy transforms a patient’s own T-cells (white blood cells) into CAR T-cells designed to recognize, attack and destroy cancerous B cells.
To learn more about CAR-T cell therapy at Duke, call the Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy Program at 919.684.8964.