The University of Iowa Health Care Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center has started treating its second patient — the second in the state — with a cellular therapy to fight synovial sarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer that can develop around any bone or connective tissue.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Tecelra in fall 2024 as the first FDA-approved T-cell therapy, a type of cancer treatment that uses a patient’s own immune cells called T-cells, or white blood cells, to fight cancer more effectively.
The T-cell therapy is known as an adoptive cell therapy, which works by collecting white blood cells from a patient’s body and engineering them to attack cancer cells before administering them back into the patient…