Dendritic Cell Therapy: The Potential and the Price

Dendritic cell therapy is a therapy that is being used and researched to help cancer patients. The technology is still developing, but the basic idea is that a patient gives a blood sample and from their blood monocytes are filtered out. These filtered monocytes will then be generated into specific dendritic cells that have been exposed to antigens related to that patient’s particular disease. These dendritic cells will then be inserted back into the patient causing cytotoxic T cells to activate against cancer cells and kill them. The advantage of this therapy is that it is specific to the patient and offers a personalized cancer therapy. While dendritic cell therapy is still being tested for many forms of cancer, it has been approved to treat prostate cancer since 2010. T cell therapy called CAR-T cell therapy has only been approved since 2018 and has shown to have amazing results in which many clinical trials showcase positive results when they have exhausted other treatment options. However, T cell therapy has had evidence of having severe side effects such as cytokine release syndrome or CRS that have resulted in severe nausea, fever, chills, rash, trouble breathing, and eventual death of some patients.

Researchers at John Hopkins University in March of 2020 have suggested that the use of dendritic cells stabilizes the progression of patients experiencing prostate cancer as well as potentially reducing the size of tumors. These researchers have also been exploring the use of dendritic cells in pancreatic cancer. Specifically, these researchers discovered that dendritic cells that lacked the gene NF-κB p50 were more likely to produce a cancer fighting immune response than other dendritic cells used in this therapy. These researchers also concluded that brain cancer, melanoma, colon cancer, sarcoma, and neuroblastoma grew slower in mice that lacked the NF-κB p50 gene. While the newfound discoveries about the NF-κB p50 gene related to dendritic cell therapy are still being tested on mice, it is promising to me that there is the potential for dendritic therapy to continue to progress into more efficient strategies. I also recognize that this therapy in itself is a gift for many cancer patients and potentially gives them a longer lifespan than they would have under normal cancer treatments like chemotherapy.

One of the main disadvantages of this therapy is how expensive it is. Due to its experimental status, dendritic cell therapy is not covered under insurance and has an average cost of around $19,000 for on therapeutic set (five to seven) of injections. This price may go up significantly depending on the status of the patient and the progression of their disease. Additionally, there would be other costs regarding traveling overseas to countries and special facilities that provide this treatment because it isn’t standard practice throughout the world. Thus, while this treatment has the potential to do a lot of good in the world, unfortunately it has not progressed enough in research to be a plausible option for many patients. It saddens me to think that some diseases such as cancer have the ability to take so much from those they inflict. That is why I strongly feel that research needs to continue to study this therapy to make it more universally available to patients.