Discover more about the latest developments in our research efforts.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a revolutionary new type of treatment that ‘trains’ a patient’s own immune cells to seek out and kill cancer.

However, its broader use as a first-line therapy treatment is limited by potentially lethal side effects and requires additional critical care for approximately half of the patients undergoing CAR T-cell treatment. Associate Professor Melissa Call’s research addresses the primary source of the dangerous side effects, known as Cytokine Release Syndrome (CRS).

Associate Professor Call’s team at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), in collaboration with researchers at the Weizmann Institute, have developed an innovative new technology that maintains the anti-cancer activity of CAR T-cell treatments, whilst improving patient safety.

The funding received from the Leukaemia Foundation is assisting Associate Professor Call’s team to explore the use of “programmable” CAR T-cell therapy in B-cell derived blood cancers (such as advanced B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL)) that are currently approved for treatment with high-toxicity CAR T therapies, and they’re seeing positive results.

Over the next 12 months, the team aims to reproduce these results in live models and perform safety studies with high doses of CAR T-cells in models with high tumour burden to monitor both weight loss and the occurrence of Cytokine Release Syndrome (CRS).

Overall, this research aims to be able to identify the best candidate therapies to bring into clinical trials and to identify an optimal balance of efficacy and safety for any given cancer context. They also hope to transition this treatment from a late-stage intervention into a front-line cancer treatment.

Improved CAR T-cell therapies will provide better health outcomes at both a lower cost and health risk for patients, ultimately allowing for its broader use across a wider range of blood cancers.