The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued several new patents on technologies related to the pioneering cellular therapy known as CTL019. The investigational personalized treatment for patients with advanced leukemia and lymphoma was developed by a research team that includes department members Drs. Carl June, Bruce Levine, and Michael Milone.

CTL019, a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, begins with patients’ own immune cells, collected through a procedure called apheresis. The cells are then engineered in a laboratory and infused back into patients’ bodies after being trained to hunt and kill their cancer cells. All patients who enroll in the trials have cancers that have progressed despite multiple conventional therapies.
Read the Department of Communications news release.