Welcome to a special episode where I'm joined by 11 of my Minnesota State students as we close out our Cancer Biology lecture! We weave through discussions surrounding generational causes of cancer, potential next-generation hallmarks, treatment & financial ethics, and what the future hold for this disease as a whole.

All said, this one is super fun because there are contributions from pre-med, pre-dental, and pre-STEM students in the room. These 11 wanted to be here, and their enthusiasm shows. I'm grateful for this group and the opportunity to teach.

The basic answer is no. When faced with R-CHOP resistance, DLBCL patients now have the option to utilize genetically modified Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells (CAR-T) designed to hunt tumors. This episode investigates the recent controversy into if these super-cells can transition into a villainous tumor themselves. We cover a paper by Garcia et. al. that showcases how much power we are adding to CAR-T, even activating oncogenes to do it. Next, we transition to a large analysis from Stanford where 724 patients are examined, with 1 developing a T-cell tumor. Sequencing this case reveals that no synthetic vector DNA integrations or activity is within the tumor. It ends up revealing a great surprise about shared evolutionary pathways between B & T-cell progenitor stem cells. Enjoy the episode!

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Hamilton Paper (TCL After CAR-T): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2401361

Garcia Paper (CARD11 in CAR-T): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07018-7