‘Curative’ blood cancer therapy coming to Westbrook cancer clinic
Yoni Resnick, the vice president of pharmacy at New England Cancer Specialists, right, and Stephen Rolfe, director of pharmacy operations, open up a liquid nitrogen shipping canister containing a solution used for a life-saving cancer therapy, called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, during a demonstration at New England Cancer Specialists in Westbrook on Oct. 14. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
After Yoni Resnick and Stephen Rolfe opened the canister, thin white vapor wafted out — a reaction caused by the liquid nitrogen inside meeting the warm air in the pharmacy at New England Cancer Specialists in Westbrook.
The canister contained a solution used for a life-saving cancer therapy that is increasingly employed to treat certain blood cancers. The treatment, called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, will be available for the first time at the Westbrook clinic.
New England Cancer Specialists expects to give the therapy to its first patient in November.
Obtaining the liquid nitrogen canister, which stores the T-cells at minus 200 degrees Celsius, was one of the key steps to making the treatment more accessible in Maine, officials with the cancer clinic said.
Resnick and Rolfe manage the pharmacy and must test the liquid nitrogen canister, which arrived at the pharmacy this week, to make sure it’s maintaining its temperature, and conduct other tests to ensure it can safely transport the T-cells and the solution they are stored in. The canister passed the first test during the initial opening on Wednesday.
Yoni Resnick, the vice president of pharmacy at New England Cancer Specialists, right, and Stephen Rolfe, director of pharmacy operations, demonstrate how they remove the metal container with the solution used for a life-saving cancer therapy, called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, from its shipping container at New England Cancer Specialists in Westbrook on Oct. 14. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
Dr. John Winters, director of the CAR T program at the clinic said patients will soon be able to receive the infusion treatment at their offices and recover at home. Winters said patients previously had to travel to Boston for the therapy. The process takes about three weeks, and patients need to stay near where they received the infusion in case complications arise, he said.
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“This harnesses the patient’s own immune cells to kill the cancer,” Winters said. The treatment can be “curative” for certain types of lymphoma and put multiple myeloma in “durable remission,” he said.
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Winters said only about 20% of patients in Maine were able to access CAR T, because of the logistical difficulties of traveling to Boston.
Resnick, vice president of pharmacy at New England Cancer Specialists, said having only one in five patients in Maine able to access CAR T is “dismal” and having a location in the state will improve access. He said barriers to access include not only the travel time to Boston, but needing a caregiver while recovering from the infusion, and also the financial costs of traveling and lodging.
Winters said the way the therapy works is patients have blood removed, the T-cells are extracted from the blood, and the blood is returned to the patient. The harvested T-cells are shipped to a lab in California in the liquid nitrogen canister, and then returned to Maine a few weeks later.
Then the patient comes back to the office, and the engineered T-cells, designed to fight their cancer, are infused into their blood, he said.
“This is curative for patients who before had no hope,” Winters said.
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Patients with late-stage lymphoma or multiple myeloma would typically have about a year or less to live without the CAR T treatments, he said.
Winters said CAR T has been available for about a decade, and is increasingly used earlier as a treatment option as outcomes from the therapy prove to work. In the future, he said, the therapy will likely become a frontline treatment for certain blood cancers, reducing reliance on chemotherapy.
He said initially it will be used on one patient at the clinic per month, but they expect usage will expand as the CAR T program at New England Cancer Specialists ramps up.
According to the American Cancer Society, CAR T is also used for certain types of leukemia, and is being researched for its effectiveness on other cancers.
According to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Maine has about 400 new cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma per year. CAR T can treat certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Multiple myeloma is a rarer cancer, at about 1.7% of all cancer diagnoses, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Deborah Cote greets Dr. John Winters at New England Cancer Specialists in Westbrook on Oct. 14. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
Deborah Cote, 69, of Dresden, said she was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015, and was selected for CAR T therapy last year. Cote said she traveled to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in March for the treatment, and had to stay in Boston for about three weeks. She said she was fortunate to have a friend willing to stay with her.
“If I could have stayed in Maine, that would have been unbelievable,” Cote said. “I have a support group here, and I missed that support group in Boston.”
Cote said the treatment has improved her life, and doctors “can’t find a wisp of cancer cells in me.”
“I feel better than I’ve felt in many years,” Cote said.
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Tagged: cancer, Health, healthcare
Joe Lawlor writes about health and human services for the Press Herald. A 24-year newspaper veteran, Lawlor has worked in Ohio, Michigan and Virginia before relocating to Maine in 2013 to join the Press. More by Joe Lawlor
