Penn Medicine researchers develop novel immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer, including cancer vaccines, immune modulatory drugs and cell-based therapies. CAR T cell therapy, one of these cell-based therapies, was first developed by Penn Medicine and was the first gene therapy to be approved by the FDA. It retrains healthy cells to hunt down and eliminate cancer cells. Penn Medicine is leading the world in delivering the promise of immunotherapy to you.
What Is Immunotherapy for Cancer?
Immunotherapy is a treatment in which the patient’s own immune system is used to fight the disease which, in many cases, is cancer. Immunotherapy technology stimulates, boosts or changes the functionality of the immune system’s natural defenses to be more efficient in detecting and destroying cancerous cells in the body. In the case of CAR T cell therapy, cells from the immune system are genetically altered to defend as needed.
Though immunotherapy is more effective for certain types of cancers than others, new immunotherapy-based treatments are currently being discovered and clinically tested. The future is limitless for immunotherapy at Penn Medicine.
The Story of Cutting-Edge Immunotherapy at Penn Medicine
The groundwork for cancer immunotherapy began in 2003 with the mapping of the human genome. For the first time, we knew which genes affected which traits in the body. But actually changing those genes would require something more.
Over the next decade, Penn Medicine built on this knowledge, creating the first FDA-approved immunotherapy, called CAR T cell therapy. CAR T cell therapy is a groundbreaking technique for retraining the body’s T cells that Penn Medicine has used to treat hundreds of patients with cancer. It was first approved for treating leukemia, a type of blood cancer.
Today, Penn Medicine's world-leading researchers are developing new immunotherapies to treat cancer, as well as other diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, infectious diseases and more.
Types of Immunotherapy Treatment
CAR T Cell Therapy
Cancer spreads quickly for a simple reason: The body can’t see it. Cancer cells start out as healthy cells, so when they mutate, they still look like healthy cells to the immune system. They’re camouflaged. The immune cells never attack.
With CAR T cell therapy, we teach immune cells to recognize cancer cells. We take some of the body’s T cells (a type of white blood cell) and genetically retrain them to find a specific chunk of biological code — the cancer fingerprint. When the T cells are returned to the body, they hunt down and destroy all cells with that fingerprint. These engineered "hunter cells" live on in the body as a permanent defense long after the cancer is gone.
First developed by Penn Medicine, CAR T cell therapy is now in clinical trials around the world in thousands of permutations for many diseases. At Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center alone, clinical trials have already led to groundbreaking, FDA-approved therapies for lymphoma and leukemia. We hope to see similar results soon for glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer.
Although still in its infancy, CAR T represents a turning point in the history of human medicine, a genuine revolution in our approach to disease.
Learn more about CAR T cell therapy
Targeted Molecular Therapy
Targeted molecular therapy involves the use of drugs that help differentiate healthy cells from cancer cells. The drugs disable the cancer cells, which allows the immune system to do its job.
Targeted therapy has been used to treat melanoma and lung cancer, and are being tested in other cancers, including ovarian cancer.
Learn more about targeted therapy
Vaccine Therapy
Penn’s pioneering cancer vaccines aim to cure cancer — or stop it from happening in the first place. Current studies focus on pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, head and neck cancers, and recurrent breast cancers.
Learn more about vaccine therapy
Known Immunotherapy Side Effects
The side effects of immunotherapy vary from patient to patient, but it is important for patients to be aware of the symptoms that may occur. There is no time table for when side effects may appear during or after treatment, but our Penn Medicine support team will be there to assis patients throughout the entire process.
Immunotherapy side effects include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Chills
- Bowl disturbances, including constipation or diarrhea
- Coughing
- Appetite changes
- Fatigue
- Fever
- Injection site reactions or pain
- Nausea
- Weight loss