An innovative cancer treatment will be available for the first time in Cheshire and Merseyside with the launch of a new NHS service.
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust in Liverpool, which provides specialist cancer care for a population of 2.4m people, has become the first NHS centre in Cheshire and Merseyside to offer Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T).
CAR-T therapy is an innovative form of immunotherapy. It involves removing T immune cells from a patient’s blood and modifying them to become CAR-T cells that are then transplanted back into the patient. The CAR-T cells can recognise a specific protein on cancer cells and attach to it, allowing them to attack the cancer.
The treatment is only available in a few centres nationally for patients with specific cancers – including B cell lymphomas and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – that have not responded to other treatments or have returned after them.
Until now, patients from Cheshire and Merseyside have had to travel to other parts of the UK to receive it.
Each treatment is manufactured individually using a patient’s own T cells in a process that takes around four to six weeks.
Professor Rowan Pritchard Jones, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside’s medical director, said the ICB was committed to ensuring residents had access to ‘highly-specialist, innovative cancer treatments closer to home’.
‘This is an important achievement and something that will make a real difference in securing better outcomes for eligible patients,’ said Prof Pritchard Jones.
Patients referred to The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in Liverpool for CAR-T therapy will first have their T cells collected by a team from NHS Blood and Transplant.
Their T cells will then be transported to a specialist pharmaceutical company to develop their own personalised CAR-T treatment.
While the patient’s CAR-T cells are being produced for them, patients will often be given chemotherapy or radiotherapy to prepare their body for treatment.
Then, when their CAR-T cells are ready, they will be admitted to the stem cell transplantation and cellular therapies ward of The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre’s Liverpool hospital. The CAR-T cells will be given to them in a transfusion that takes around 30 minutes.
