Cancer-Fighting Cells Engineered Inside Patients’ Bodies Rather Than Laboratory for the First Time

Ghoti Ichthus · Sunday at 2:18 AM

Cancer-Fighting Cells Engineered Inside Patients’ Bodies Rather Than Laboratory for the First Time

By Andy Corbley
Dec 18, 2025

"In a pair of groundbreaking studies, scientists replicated a time-consuming, laboratory-based, cancer therapy within myeloma patients’ own bodies.
If standardized, such an advancement would allow for one of the most successful non-chemo cancer treatments to be done both faster and cheaper.
CAR T-cell therapy involves retrieving a patient’s immune system component called a T-cell and using a virus to genetically add the CAR, or chimeric antigen receptor, to it. This process is done in a lab—typically outside the hospital where the patient is being treated—before the cells are shipped back for transplant.
The alteration allows T-cells to home in on cancer cells directly by penetrating the biological stealth capabilities tumors have, but is also expensive and laborious. If, scientists have considered in the last decade, the process could be done inside the body, it would save lives that are sometimes lost waiting out the month-or-so-long process it takes to alter the T-cells in the lab.
That’s exactly what’s been established in a pair of recent trials, the results of which were just presented at the American Society of Hematology’s (ASH) annual meeting."

More