Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer

Cancer treatment is quickly evolving from traditional chemotherapy to engineering our own cells as living medicines. With this momentum, I'm developing a new kind of cell therapy that brings together two unlikely partners: CAR-T cells - designer immune cells that target specific markers on cancer cells - and probiotics - ‘helpful bacteria’ that can selectively grow in solid tumors.

Despite attempts to improve treatment over the last few decades, children with advanced sarcomas of the muscle or bone continue to die from their disease. New treatments are sorely needed. Therapies that utilize the immune system to fight cancer, such as white blood cells that are engineered to target specific proteins on tumors, have shown promise in the lab. Their ability to cure patients, however, has been limited by a powerful tumor environment that inhibits the immune system.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the second most common type of leukemia in children and remains very deadly in patients with treatment-resistant disease. A novel type of therapy where patient’s infection-fighting cells (“T cells”) are engineered in a laboratory with a cancer-fighting protein called a chimeric antigen receptor, or a CAR, has shown great promise in patients with another type of leukemia that arises from B cells.