Blood Cancer Awareness Month: Exploring innovative treatments

• Author: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN
• Published date: 23 September 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

An estimated 68,000 people die from blood cancer each year in the United States alone, according to the Leukemia Research Foundation. The statistics in Israel are unknown.

But new and innovative treatments are being explored, according to Dr. Martin Ellis, Chairman of the Israel Society of Hematology and Transfusion Medicine.

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He spoke to The Jerusalem Post about two newer treatments for the main types of blood cancers, leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma, in recognition of Blood Cancer Awareness Month.

For starters, CAR-T cells are currently playing a key role in treating people with blood cancer.

"We remove the T-cells from the patient and send them to the lab, where they get engineered using genetic engineering technology to identify specific molecules on the surface of the patient's cancer," Ellis, who is also head of the Hematology Department at Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, explained. "These engineered CAR-T cells are re-infused into the body intravenously. Then, the modified cells seek and destroy the malignant cells in the body."

He said the treatment is generally used on people with lymphoma and multiple myeloma, and specifically those who had prior treatments that did not work or had been in remission and the cancer came back.

"CAR-T can achieve a remission in the region of 60% to 70% of patients," Ellis said. "And it appears that around 30% are actually cured. This is an unprecedented rate of success in the realm of cancer therapy."

Doctors are already using the patient's own immune system to attack his or her tumors, but on the horizon will be the use of CRISPR...