Luca Biavati, MD, on Bone Marrow T-Cells for Adoptive Cell Therapy

Luca Biavati, MD, from Johns Hopkins Medicine, discussed bone marrow T-cells and bone marrow infiltrating lymphocytes as a source for adoptive cell therapy at the 34th Annual Meeting & Pre-Conference Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2019).

Transcript:

So, the conference is about cancer immunotherapy. And what makes me excited about it is, I study bone marrow T-cells and bone marrow infiltrating lymphocytes as a source for adoptive cell therapy. So, the whole conference is about the use of either monoclonal antibodies or vaccines or adoptive cell therapy to at least improve treatment of cancer.

I’ve seen several posters and presentations about how to study the tumor micro-environment and T-cells, and also several ways on how to improve adoptive cell therapy and immunotherapy in several different solid tumors and hematological cancers.

And there have been several improvements on the applicability of these techniques. They’re still a lot expansive, but I see that maybe they’re going to be more available and definitely more efficient and effective in the foreseeable future.

Well in 5 years probably like we’ll have a whole new set of problems we are not actually seeing right now, as it happened like 5 years ago when we were thinking about now. So yeah, probably like we’ll have new issues with cancer therapies that now we don’t see because we’re not close enough to see that kind of problems yet. Probably like better progression-free survival, better treatments, and then obviously new problems.