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by sam537 1598 days ago
Simplify it like this:

T-cell: very effective at killing; not as good at recognizing specific things.

Antibodies: not that effective at killing; excellent at specifically recognizing things.

CAR-T: Let's stick an antibody against X (eg CD19, CD22) to a T-cell surface so it can recognize with the antibody and kill with its innate capacity to kill.

Ta da!

It's fascinating, it is changing hematologic oncology. The bad news is, as always, the price and the manufacturing time (2-8 weeks). This last part seems to be getting better.

3 comments

> The bad news is, as always, the price

It's my understanding that this is no longer _actually_ a $600,000K+ price tag anymore but that drug firms are now in the "profit recouping" phase. Decide for yourself if that's the way it should be but the good news is that it definitely will not be insane forever.

I've had this thought that natural ability to fight of cancer cells was a precision/recall problem for the cells. Good to see that the body has ways to approach this problem. Really cool to see us use antibodies to really improve the recall
Thank you, this is a very good TLDR.