Greater Victoria nurses who care for those who are seriously ill and those approaching the end of their lives will be among the first medical teams in B.C. to start working with a new, possibly revolutionary cancer treatment.
The oncology and palliative care teams at Royal Jubilee Hospital are now working with bispecific T-cell engagers, new drugs that show "great promise" in treating a range of cancers, including blood cancers like lymphoma.
“It's an antibody treatment that simultaneously binds to a cancer cell and a T-cell,” said Dr. Ashley Freeman, a medical oncologist and malignant hematology lead at BC Cancer, in a news release. “And the idea is that the T-cell kills the cancer cell.”
Island Health nurse Erica Kroeger explained that the bispecific medication uses the body's own immune system to fight cancer in which the T-cell recognizes the cancer cell as foreign, and activates an immune response to kill the cancer cells.
While chemotherapy uses a "shotgun approach" by killing all rapidly dividing cells – both good and bad – bispecific immunotherapy is more targeted on cancer cells themselves.
“What it’s doing is harnessing your immune system’s ability to target those bad cells – those cancer cells – and kill them off,” Kroeger noted in the release.
According to Freeman, BC Cancer chose RJH – which is the first hospital outside of Vancouver to offer the treatment – to host bispecifics because it's the main cancer therapy treatment hospital on Vancouver Island, and the hospital has an excellent record of supporting cancer therapy.
“It was great working with RJH because they recognized the value in this exciting new class of cancer therapy and worked quickly to implement it. As a result, we were the first centre outside of Vancouver to be using these medications in the province. Their support and partnership were the most important thing in getting this up and running,” noted Freeman in the release.
Though it's still the early days of bispecific medication, nurses say they have high hopes for the future.
“Even 10 years ago when I started, it was mostly just chemotherapy. Immunotherapy was this thing that was coming out, and now we have these bispecifics and it's just going to snowball,” said Mackenzie Gavidia-Alas, manager of the RJH cancer care program.
