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Shanghai Children’s Medical Center launches joint laboratory with US counterpart to practice cell-based immune therapy for children

Shanghai Children’s Medical Center and the National Children’s Medical Center in Washington launched a joint laboratory today to collaborate on cell-based immune therapy for children with leukemia, immunity diseases and cancer.

Cancer is one of the important case for children’s non-accidental death. There are 110 new cases among 1 million children below 15 years old in the city, according to Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Traditionally, chemotherapy and radiotherapy are the commonest treatment for children with cancer. However, they can’t completely kill cancer cells and also can damage healthy cells, causing serious adverse reaction and a high relapse. How to improve treatment effects while dropping the negative effects are a major topic that experts are studying.

“The reasons why people get cancer is their immunity system fail to identity cancerous calls and fail to kill them. So cell-based immune therapy is to extract immune cells from patients themselves and ‘teach’ them to know cancerous cells,” said Dr Liu Yang, director of the National Children’s Medical Center’s Cancer Research Center. “After cultivating and expanding these immune cells, they will transplant back to patients. These cells can recognize cancerous cells and fight with them. Since they are from patients themselves, there is no rejection and can last for a long time than using medications.”

The cancer in Washington is one of the earliest to carry out such therapy and has received very positive effects on patients with lymphoma. “We are studying to expand the therapy to other cancers like leukemia,” Liu said.

Zhou Binbing from Shanghai Children’s Medical Center said it is the first in the nation to launch cell-based immune therapy of cancer patients and the therapy is a very promising method for future medical practice.

 




 

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