Imaging CAR T Cells Will Assist Doctors' Treatment Strategies, Says Dr Reona Sakemura
Predicting T-cell toxicity is a key factor when it comes to successfully using CAR T-cell therapy, said Reona Sakemura, MD, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the Mayo Clinic.
Imaging CAR T-cells Will Assist Doctors' Treatment Strategies, Says Dr Reona Sakemura
Transcript:
How will being able to assess CAR T-cell expansion, trafficking, and toxicity, help improve successful use of these therapies?
Imaging CAR T-cells in vivo will potentially allow us to assist scar tissue expansion traffic into tumor sites. In order to do so, we incorporate NIS, which is sodium iodide symporter, into CAR T-cells to visualize CAR T-cells in vivo. By using this technology we may be able to change the treatment strategy when the CAR T-cells are not expanding properly or there’s not traffic into tumor sites. If we are able to predict the CAR T-cell toxicity, prompt intervention may be initiated.
Do we know how often CAR T-cells are not trafficking to the right area duing treatment?
So we don't really know that yet. This is kind of like a hypothesis, that why CAR T-cells are not working in solid tumors. We think that the trafficking is a problem. So if you can assist that by imaging, that will help us a lot to figure out what's going on, or maybe you can use the other antigen to direct CAR T-cells.
