LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Cancer patients in Louisville and throughout the region soon will have access to some of the most advanced immunotherapy treatments available.
Louisville resident Thomas E. Dunbar has pledged $1 million to the University of Louisville to create a specialized center to provide chimeric antigen receptor positive T (CAR T) cell therapies to patients at the U of L James Graham Brown Cancer Center and other centers in the Midwest.
The new program will be named the Dunbar CAR T-Cell Program.
“This gift will allow both kids and adults to be treated right here in Kentucky with the most innovative cell-based immunotherapy being developed,” said Jason Chesney, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U of L Brown Cancer Center.
In CAR T-cell therapies, immune cells are extracted from the patient’s own blood and then are genetically modified to fight cancer. The modified cells are infused back into the patient where they fight the cancer and create long-term immunity to its recurrence.
In addition to dramatic treatment results, CAR T-cell immunotherapy leads to fewer toxic side effects than traditional chemotherapy.
“Patients who have been treated with all the conventional therapies who then underwent treatment in clinical trials with CAR T cells had dramatic response rates. Eighty-three percent of kids in the original trial who had lethal, terminal B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia responded to this therapy,” Chesney said.
The Dunbar CAR T-Cell Program will include laboratories for manufacturing the CAR T cells and will administer both FDA-approved and clinical-trial therapies to adult and pediatric cancer patients.
The goal is for the facilities to be fully functional and receiving patients by Sept. 30, 2020.
Tom Dunbar’s son, Evan, lost his battle to cancer with neuroblastoma in 2001 at the age of 6. In 2009, Wally Dunbar, Tom Dunbar’s father, lost his battle with melanoma.
This year, Tom’s physician wife, Stephanie Altobellis, M.D., helped identify his own cancer.
“Kentucky is at ground zero, with the nation’s highest rates of cancer diagnosis and death,” Tom Dunbar said. “It’s completely unacceptable. We have to lead the charge right here where the need is the greatest and we can do the most good. We need treatments that are not toxic. Watching our loved ones miserable with pain, often just from the treatments, and yet still die in front of us simply can’t be the best that we can do.”
To learn more about how CAR T-cell treatment works visit: uoflbrowncancercenter.org
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