61-year-old Paulo Peregrino was diagnosed in 2010 with prostate cancer and ten years later with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. With little hope of a cure, he had exhausted all of his lymphoma treatment options, having undergone 45 chemotherapy treatments over five years and a bone marrow transplant. Nothing was improving his condition.
The 61-year-old’s doctors decided that all they could do was palliative care, which is aimed at patients who are in the final stages of a disease, with the aim of recognizing and dealing with the pain they are experiencing and improving their daily life.
It was then decided that Peregrino would undergo the groundbreaking CAR T-cell therapy, one of the most advanced cancer treatments developed to date. The tumor he had disappeared according to the Newsweek report, with the patient being discharged from the Hospital das Clinicas of the University of São Paulo (USP) School of Medicine in Brazil, Radioagencia Nacional reported.
“Now we have to continue the case. We know that after a certain period of time, the disease can come back. We can talk about total cancer treatment only after five years. However, this is already very encouraging because there was no longer any kind of treatment for him,” USP School of Medicine physician and researcher Vanderson Rocha, who was involved in Peregrino’s treatment, told A24.
The exact treatment
Treatment is based on reprogramming the immune system to attack cancer cells. It involves the removal and isolation of T-lymphocytes from the body, which are responsible for fighting pathogens and killing infected cells. Once removed, the cells are reprogrammed to become more effective at targeting and destroying cancer cells. They are then injected back into the patient’s body, with the whole process taking up to 60 days.
CAR-T cell therapy emerged in the United States and began to be used experimentally to treat patients with end-stage cancer in the early 2010s. In 2017 it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
While the treatment it’s proven to be effective, it’s expensive – costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient – and can currently only be used to treat certain types of cancer, such as lymphoma, leukemia and myeloma. So far it is only available in certain countries including USA her China of United Kingdom and her Australia.
Peregrino is one of the few Brazilians to have undergone the innovative treatment, with its availability very limited in his country.