A promising treatment for cancer patients called CAR T-cell therapy was given to a patient at a Greek public hospital for the first time in the country on January 22.

The therapy is a type of treatment in which a patient’s T cells (a type of immune system cell) are changed in the laboratory so they will attack cancer cells. The T cells are taken from a patient’s own blood.

The treatment was used on a patient suffering from chemo-resistant primary mediastinal lymphoma, hospital officials said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The therapy was provided at the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit of Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, which was selected in 2019 to implement CAR-T lymphocyte therapy and successfully completed its certification process in that treatment.

The T cells collected from the patient were sent to a specialized laboratory in the United States, where they were engineered and then sent back to Greece and injected back into the patient.

Source: greek reporter