CAR-M era begins as Carisma doses first patient

Last month, doctors at the Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia inserted a needle into a patient with an untreatable tumor and began drawing blood into a machine.

The machine filtered out everything but a specific set of immune cells that were then packaged, put on a plane and shipped, still warm, to a facility in Sunnyvale, CA. Over 24 days, technicians expanded the cells, armed them with a new kind of receptor and sent them back, now cryogenically frozen, on a plane to Philadelphia to be infused back into the patient.