CAR T-cell therapies have had great success treating blood cancers around the world. In Canada, several products are approved for tough-to-treat cases of B cell leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
CAR T-cell therapy works by filtering out the white blood cells from a patient's blood, introducing a synthetic gene and re-injecting the modified cells back into the patient. These new CAR-T cells recognize a specific protein on the surface of cancer cells, allowing them to find and kill off the cancer cells without damaging the healthy cells.
However, these treatments are personalized, made using a patient's own T cells, which makes them very expensive and not readily available. Our Cell and Gene Therapy Challenge program helps researchers across Canada collaborate with NRC scientists to create accessible and affordable cell and gene therapies for Canadians.
Our Human Health Therapeutics (HHT) Research Centre has a long history of working with nanobodies, including identifying and characterizing a unique nanobody that uses ninja-like precision to find the CD22 protein on leukemia and lymphoma cells.
CAR T-cell therapy can be adapted to treat different types of cancer by targeting different proteins. Our researchers have made significant progress in developing 2 first-in-class made-in-Canada CAR T-cell therapies.
In collaboration with The Ottawa Hospital, BC Cancer and BioCanRx, our researchers have developed the first made-in-Canada CAR T-cell therapy using this nanobody to treat B cell leukemia. The treatment is now in a first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial at several sites across Canada.
Building on this work, our researchers are now using our innovative nanobody technology to develop CAR T-cell therapies for hard-to-treat solid tumor cancers such as pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancers by targeting mesothelin (MSLN), a protein often found on these tumors. In early studies on ovarian cancer, this new nanobody MSLN-CAR-T treatment is performing better than traditional CAR-T treatments using single-chain antibodies.
Looking farther ahead, our research is also focused on developing alternative CAR therapies, including CAR-NK (natural killer cell) therapies, which could offer a single product that treats many patients, making it a much more cost-effective solution.