Talking Cellular Immunotherapy, CAR T-Cell Therapy and Eradicating Pediatric Cancer

Dr. Holly Pacenta, Pacenta takes us into the future of curing and treating pediatric cancer through the use of the patient's own immune system to target the cancer. At the forefront of the technology is CAR T-cell therapy targeting relapsed and refractory B-ALL cells to eradicate cancer with minimal side effects.

Meet the speaker 

Meet Dr. Pacenta

Related information

Cook Children's Cellular Immunotherapy program

Cook Children’s Leukemia and Lymphoma care

Cook Children's Oncology program

 Cook Children's Hematology and Oncology

Transcript

00:00:02 

Host:  Hello and welcome to Cook Children's Doc Talk. Our guest for this episode is pediatric hematologist oncologist Dr. Holly Pacenta. Dr. Pacenta began her career at Children's Hospital Colorado, where she developed her primary interest in new treatments for children with relapsed leukemia, including immunotherapy, cellular therapy and targeted therapy. She has been heavily involved in research, has published several works and received awards and recognition for her work. Today, Dr. Pacenta oversees the Cellular Immunotherapy program at Cook Children's where she and the oncology team are very excited about providing CAR T-cell therapy to patients with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. Cellular immunotherapy introduces a new era in the treatment of children and young adults here at Cook Children's. Welcome Dr. Pacenta. We are very excited to have you here to talk about this incredible program and CAR T-cell therapy.

00:01:01 

Dr. Pacenta: Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:03

Host: Can you start by giving us a little background on the cellular immunotherapy program and an overview of immunotherapy and CAR T-cell therapy?

00:01:11 

Dr. Pacenta  Sure. So I think first to give an overview of immunotherapy and CAR T-cell therapy, we think at the forefront of the future of curing and treating pediatric cancer is to use, help use the patient's own immune system to target the cancer. So that's what immunotherapy is. Immuno meaning the immune system in therapy meeting treatments, so using the immune system to help treat your own cancer. And then CAR T-cell is a form, kind of a hybrid, of cellular immunotherapy. So we use one of the cells as part of the immune system, the T cells that typically help fight infection, and those get sent to a lab where they're reprogrammed to target the leukemia. So that's CAR T-cell therapy is. Then, our cellular immunotherapy program is a dedicated group of oncologists and stem cell transplant doctors here at Cook Children's along with some supportive services like pharmacy, dieticians, psychologists, etc., that will help provide these types of therapies to our patients.

00:02:13 

Host:  So KYMRIAH® is the CAR T-cell therapy currently approved for pediatric treatment of children and young adults with refractory or relapsed B-cell ALL, why this particular condition?

00:02:26

Dr. Pacenta:  Immunotherapy and cellular therapy are a big interest in pediatric cancer in general. And there has been a lot of research to try to use this type of treatment for many different cancers....