Jefferson Health oncologist Jennifer Johnson had exhausted all the standard treatment options for her 49-year-old patient with esophageal cancer, who was likely to die within months. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy had kept the Northeast Philadelphia woman alive for six years after her diagnosis but no longer were enough to stop her cancer from spreading.
Johnson knew her patient needed something novel. She recalled a presentation several years prior at a conference for head and neck cancers, where a doctor discussed an experimental treatment called T-cell receptor (TCR) therapy. This type of cancer immunotherapy works by engineering the immune system to fight cancer and falls into the same family of treatments as CAR-T, or chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, an approach pioneered at the University of Pennsylvania that has revolutionized treatment for blood cancers.
She thought TCR therapy’s clever approach could work against solid tumors, where CAR-T had not been effective. “I just remember sitting in the room and watching him present, thinking, I’m gonna use that one day,” the oncologist and cancer researcher recalled. To read the full story.