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Tradition of cellular therapy innovation continues to improve cancer care at Ohio State

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Decades of cellular therapy research led to a breakthrough in blood cancer care at Ohio State while building a base for a future of continued innovation in patient care.

Ohio State cancer researchers have been at the forefront of cellular therapy since the 1980s, when blood and marrow transplants began changing treatment and improved outcomes for many patients.

That spirit of innovation continues today at a massive scale at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, where renowned specialists like Samantha Jaglowski, MD, develop, study and deliver groundbreaking therapies to blood cancer patients.

“In the last decade, really, the ability to engineer either a patient’s cells or a donor’s cells to make them recognize cancer has come to the forefront and become one of the mainstays of treatment for us,” she says.

Click here to learn more about cellular therapy for cancer patients at The Ohio State University.

Jaglowski, the medical director of Ohio State’s Blood and Marrow Transplant Program, has been instrumental in the growth of cellular therapy at the OSUCCC – James, including the clinical study of CAR T (chimeric antigens receptor T-cell therapy), an immunotherapy treatment that turns patients’ own white blood cells into cancer-fighting tools.

“For our blood cancer patients, we take out their white blood cells, and then we can incubate them, basically, with a virus that can teach them to insert some DNA into those specific cells,” Jaglowski says. “It trains them how to escape some of that immune evasion that cancer cells are so good at, and so these cells become supercharged.”

Jaglowski takes a deep dive into the past, present and future of cellular therapy at Ohio State our our Cancer-Free World Podcast. Watch via the video player above, or listen on SoundCloud.

CAR T has become a vital component of treatment for many blood cancer patients, continuing to work well after the initial procedures have been completed.

“We've introduced the cells, they find and fight the cancer. And then, if this cancer happens to return again later, the cells are already primed to go find it and find it,” Jaglowski says. “We've been treating patients on trial at Ohio State for seven plus years now. Our first commercially treated patients are passing their fifth-year anniversaries, and we have folks that we treated five to seven years ago who are still in remission.”

Click here for more details about CAR T-cell therapy at the OSUCCC – James.

While Jaglowski and her colleagues continue to study potential improvements to CAR T, they’re also working to expand the use of cellular therapy to benefit more patients in new ways, including work to provide the treatments in an outpatient setting.

“There are a number of patients who don't have to be in the hospital, so we hope to soon open an outpatient transplant cellular therapy unit, where our patients will come to a clinic every day instead of having to sit in a hospital bed,” she says. “We'll make sure they’re feeling good, that they're not having fevers and that nausea is under control. If they're starting to feel not so good, we’ll make adjustments to try to get them to feel a whole lot better.”

Outpatient cancer care is growing at the OSUCCC – James. Click here for details on The James Outpatient Care in Ohio State’s Carmenton innovation district.

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