Addenbrooke's lab to make CAR-T cells for cancer treatment

The laboratory will be one of only a handful of sites across the UK able to manufacture the cells for use in clinical trials, and to develop new CAR-T cell therapies for different cancers and auto-immune diseases.

CAR-T, or chimeric antigen reception T cell therapy, is offered to adult patients with aggressive B-cell lymphomas and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia who have either relapsed or not responded well to chemotherapy or a stem cell transplant.

CAR-T cells coming out of storage ready for re-infusion (Image: CUH NHS Foundation Trust) Addenbrooke's was the first hospital in the East of England to offer the therapy, and has now treated more than 100 adult CAR-T patients.

The immunotherapy works by re-engineering a patient's immune system, tracking their own immune cells - known as T-cells - to fight and destroy the cancer.

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust has just been awarded £1.4m worth of grant funding from the National Institute of Health Research to help supply the equipment for the laboratory's research, and deliver more clinical trials to patients across the East of England.

The new cleanrooms (engineered spaces which are controlled from contamination) are set to open in the next 12 to 18 months, and will expand the facilities of the current Cambridge Cellular Therapy Laboratory (CCTL) at Addenbrooke's in readiness for the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital - set to be built by 2029.

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Sarah Albon, director of the CCTL, said: "At the moment, there are a number of novel cell therapy products available commercially, but as an NHS trust we have to buy them in for our patients.

Sarah Albon, director of the Cambridge Cellular Therapy Laboratory (CCTL) at Addenbrooke’s. (Image: CUH NHS Foundation Trust) "Having this state-of-the-art space is the missing part of the puzzle for bringing cell therapies from the research bench to bedside.

"It will enable us to translate research into high-quality medicine, readily available for our patients and the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, planned to be built here in Cambridge."

Dr Ben Uttenthal, clinical lead for the CAR-T cell therapy programme at Addenbrooke's, added: "If our clinical trials are successful, we can then look to scale up and roll out treatments nationally and globally, and that’s a really exciting prospect."