September marks National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and this year at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, we kick-started the commemorative period on the heels of exciting news about breakthroughs in pediatric cancer immunotherapy research.
It was a pivotal moment that has turned into a new era for cancer immunotherapy. On April 17, 2012, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia researchers for the first time treated a pediatric patient with a cellular therapy that used her own reprogrammed immune cells, called T cells, to attack her aggressive form of blood cancer.