cell therapy
Cell therapy uses living cells as the medicine itself. Rather than giving a chemical that acts on cells, doctors give cells, often the patient's own, that have been selected, grown, or genetically rewired to perform a job and then returned to the body where they keep working on their own.
The best-known form is CAR-T therapy for cancer. A patient's T cells are collected, engineered in the lab to carry a synthetic receptor that recognizes a marker on tumor cells, multiplied, and infused back. They then hunt down and kill the cancer, and because they are alive they can divide and persist, sometimes giving long-lasting protection from a single treatment.
Cell therapies are powerful but complex. They are 'living drugs' that must be manufactured for, and sometimes from, each patient, making them very expensive and logistically demanding. They can also cause severe immune reactions, and engineering cells to be both effective and safe, hitting tumors without harming healthy tissue, remains a central challenge.
In CAR-T therapy, a patient's own T cells are engineered to recognize the CD19 marker on B-cell leukemia and then reinfused to attack the cancer.
A 'living drug' made from engineered cells that keep working inside the body.
Cell therapies blur the line between 'drug' and 'procedure'; CAR-T products are regulated as biologics but delivered much like a transplant.