How Cell Therapies May Treat Lung Cancer

Cell therapies, which have primarily made waves in the treatment of patients with blood cancer, are showing potential for the treatment of patients with solid tumors such as lung cancer, as one expert explained in a recent interview with CURE.

At a recent CURE Educated Patient® Lung Cancer Summit, held in tandem with the 2025 PER® New York Lung Cancer Symposium in New York City, Dr. Adam J. Schoenfeld, a thoracic medical oncologist and Complex Therapeutics Section Head at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, delivered an extensive overview of how cellular therapies are shaping the future of lung cancer care.

During the day of the summit, Schoenfeld sat down for an interview with CURE to discuss the key takeaways from his talk, with the doctor explaining the basics of how cell therapies work and how they may be applied to lung cancer in the future.

“The idea with cell therapy is that we can use your own immune cells as basically living drugs,” he said. “We can teach them and engineer them to identify and kill cancer cells. And this is a field that's rapidly changing.”

Transcript

How does cell therapy work, and how might it be applied to solid tumors such as lung cancer?

The idea with cell therapy is that we can use your own immune cells as basically living drugs. We can teach them and engineer them to identify and kill cancer cells. And this is a field that's rapidly changing. We've had two recent [FDA] approvals in other solid tumors. We've had CAR-T cell therapies in leukemia and lymphoma, and we're hoping to bring some of those benefits to lung cancer in the near future.

It's definitely a challenge to do this, because all the cancers are different, and there are different targets. They have different ways of evading the immune system, but we're making tons of progress, and I think things are changing really rapidly. So CAR-T cell therapy is one example that's been approved in leukemia and lymphoma, but we have other ones called TILs and TCR therapeutics, and TIL was actually approved in melanoma, and we're using that in lung cancer now, and we're using TCRs too. So hopefully in the near future, we'll have even more effective cell therapies for lung cancer.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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