The goal of our core laboratory is dedicated to the development of precision immune cell therapy for cancer, using tumor neoantigens as vaccines to train and expand patients autoimmune cells for immunotherapy, which can be applied to the clinical treatment of cancer patients. We do hope that this technology can create new vision for cancer treatment in this field, and become a characteristic medical treatment for the late stage cancer patients.
Cancer is the top ten cause of death in the world. According to the statistics, there are at least 40,000 people die from cancer in Taiwan each year. The use of traditional cancer treatment, such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy or targeted drug therapy, can effectively control the early stage of cancer, but when patient’s malignant tumor recurs in late metastasis ,the application of these treatments is also limited by drug resistance.
The recently launched immunomodulatory drugs (anti-PD1 and anti-CTLA4) have shown better efficacy than traditional treatments for a few types of cancers (such as melanoma or lung cancer), but patients response rates has only reached about 20-30%, because these immunomodulatory drugs are "non-specific" activation of the immune system, the activated immune cells may not only attack cancer cells, but also normal tissues and organs. Therefore, some patients may develop severe autologous Immune side effects.
In recent years, personalized autoimmune cell therapy for cancer patients is another breakthrough development in cancer treatment, and also a new direction for the worlds medical pharmacy in the future. Autoimmune cell therapy has been developed abroad for many years.
In order to accelerate the development of autologous cell therapy technology and clinical services in Taiwan, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced in September 2018 the draft amendment of "Regulations Governing the Application of Specific Medical Examination Technique and Medical Device", conditionally open six autologous cell therapy technology projects, including the use of autoimmune cells to treat patients with (1) first to third stage solid tumors, which are invalid after standard treatments; ( 2) Stage IV solid cancer; and (3) Patients with hematological malignancies that have invalid after standard treatments.