Washington, DC (PRWEB) May 28, 2014

Catherine M. Bollard, MBChB, MD, director of Childrens National Health Systems Program for Cell Enhancement and Technologies for Immunotherapy (CETI), and her team have performed the hospitals first treatment using T-cell therapy for a 6-month-old patient with congenital immune deficiency and a life-threatening virus infection.

Not only does this therapy offer a potentially curative treatment for patients who have failed conventional therapies for infections and cancer, the procedure sets the stage for avoiding potentially toxic drugs which can ultimately reduce inpatient stays and medical costs.

Its extremely important, offering a novel therapeutic thats not available at the majority of hospitals worldwide, said Dr. Bollard, a member of the Division of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation and senior scientist at Childrens Nationals Center for Cancer and Immunology Research at Childrens Research Institute. She is also the Principal Investigator and the Sheik Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation.

Childrens National is one of the few hospitals in the world to offer cellular therapy to treat life-threatening infections in patients with immune deficiencies as well as preventing or treating relapse in children with cancer. Cellular therapy uses the bodys own immune system to fight cancer and/or infections.

Patients from other hospitals and childrens facilities have been referred to Childrens National because of the uniqueness of the cell therapies we can now offer here, Dr. Bollard said. This kind of procedure reduces the amount of time for care and is not only cost effective for a hospital but also more tolerable for the patient, said Dr. Bollard. None of this could have been achieved without every one of those members within the CETI Program pulling together as a team to make it happen.

In the first of its kind cellular therapy achievement at Childrens National, Dr. Bollard and her team have shown that in the laboratory they can train nave or inexperienced immune system cells (T-cells) to kill cancer and/or viruses. In the first patient treated here, T-cells were grown from the patients mother and then injected into the young patient, who had severe combined immunodeficiency and a potentially life threatening virus infection. The T-cells the patient received (cytotoxic T lymphocytes) are a type of white blood cell that can kill virus-infected cells or cancer cells infected or cells that are damaged in other ways.

The babys immunodeficiency ailments included SCID, or severe combined immunodeficiency, a primary immune deficiency, which can result in the onset of one or more serious infections within the first months of life. Early in life, the child was infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV), a latent virus related to herpes that has significant morbidity and high mortality rates in immune compromised people. Initially, the patient had received a bone marrow transplant, but the CMV could not be cleared with the drug therapy he received after transplant, Dr. Bollard said.

Conventional treatment using antiviral agents is expensive and toxic and can be ineffective. Transfer of virus-specific T cytotoxic cells is seen as an alternative means of preventing and treating these infections. The hospital takes donor cells and manufactures them in the lab to fight specific viruses and/or cancer. The cells are given to the patients in the outpatient clinic, in a procedure that takes less than five minutes. The cytotoxic T-cells usually take within two to six weeks after which time the patient may no longer need other medications to treat or prevent infection.

We give these cells to the patient and then we hope that in a couple of weeks the CMV viral load falls to very low levels or even zero, Dr. Bollard said. This patient is 6 months old. By giving these T-cells, he can get off the drug therapy and spare his kidneys from the toxicity of the antiviral drugs.

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Catherine M. Bollard, MBCHB, MD, of Childrens National Performs Its First Treatment Using T-Cell Therapy On Child ...