Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: The Million-Copy Bestseller

by Peter Attia

It took many more years and several iterations, but Rosenberg and his team23 adapted a technique that had been developed in Israel that involved taking T cells from a patient’s blood, then using genetic engineering to add antigen receptors that were specifically targeted to the patient’s tumors. Now the T cells were programmed to attack the patient’s cancer. Known as chimeric antigen receptor T cells (or CAR-T), these modified T cells could be multiplied in the lab and then infused back into the patient. In 2010, Rosenberg and his team reported their first success with a CAR-T treatment, in a patient with advanced follicular lymphoma who had undergone multiple rounds of conventional treatments, including chemotherapy, as well as a different kind of immunotherapy, all without success. Other groups pursued the technique as well, and finally, in 2017, the first two CAR-T-based treatments were approved by the FDA (making them the first cell and gene therapies ever approved by the FDA), one for adult lymphoma and another for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common cancer in children. It had taken nearly fifty years, but Steve Rosenberg’s once-outlandish theory had finally yielded a breakthrough.