Why CAR-T cell therapy is the cancer killer the world needs now

Austin Wolcott was 18 years old and pretty sure he wouldn’t survive the year.

It was the summer of 2020, and Wolcott had been given the disheartening news that his Stage 4 Classical Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which he’d been battling for just under a year, was back.

Despite aggressive chemotherapy, which briefly sent his cancer into remission, the malignancy spread to his vertebrae.

But his doctors at the Bone Marrow Transplant Clinic in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, had an idea.

Would Wolcott be willing to try a relatively new and experimental treatment, something called CAR-T therapy?

“I didn’t feel especially hopeful about it, but I was willing to try anything that may help,” says Wolcott.

Everything about CAR-T “sounded like something out of a science-fiction movie,” he says. “It was portrayed as this cancer-seeking missile that knew exactly where to go and what to do.”

That description isn’t hyperbolic, says Dr. Michael Chu, an oncologist who’s been leading CAR-T clinical trials at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Alberta.

CAR-T therapy basically boils down to building cells that outsmart cancer, beating it at its own game.

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