Dr. Theodore Laetsch is on the leading edge of fighting blood cancer in children. He was recently the lead investigator for a Novartis study where his team genetically engineered T-cells to fight the leukemia cells with substantial results, and will be one of our panelists at our D CEO Healthcare Breakfast next week.
UT Southwestern and Children’s Health partnered to be one of 13 clinical trial locations for the study, which entailed removing blood from the patient, inserting a gene into the T-cells that fight illness to target the leukemia when they were put back into the patient. These Chimeric Antigen Receptor-T cells attack the cancer in a more targeted way than chemotherapy or radiation could.
In addition to leading research and teaching, he still sees patients at Children’s. He chatted with D CEO Healthcare last year, noting that the CAR-T development started in Philadelphia where he did a fellowship in pediatric hematology oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2012 before arriving in Dallas.
“It’s really amazing to get to see new therapy and try to help out patients,” he said last year. “These kids have very few options, and it’s been remarkably successful. It’s been a great honor to be a part of it.”
Laetsch, who studied agricultural and biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona and went to medical school at the University of California-San Francisco, continues to work toward fighting cancer in children in the lab and the patient room.
To hear more from Laetsch and the rest of our panelists, get your tickets to our healthcare breakfast panel on Thursday, Oct. 18. Registration begins at 7 a.m., and the discussion will start at 7:45 a.m. Learn more and buy tickets at the Eventbrite page, and you’ll want to hurry because these events tend to sell out.
