At New England Cancer Specialists, being the first to bring CAR-T Cellular Therapy to Maine is part of our commitment to personalized cancer care. We study each patient’s cancer carefully to find the best treatment for them.

What Is CAR-T Cell Therapy?

CAR-T stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. T cells are white blood cells that fight disease. With CAR-T, doctors collect some of your T cells and send them to a lab. The lab updates the cells so they can spot your very specific cancer. These updated CAR-T cells are grown in large numbers and then put back into your body through an IV line. Inside your body, they track down cancer cells, attack them, and make more T cells to keep fighting.

Personalized Care at the Cell Level

Cancer is not the same for everyone. Even cancers with the same name can act differently in different people. This idea is the core of precision oncology. Our oncologists use details about a person’s cancer to pick the treatments that have the best chance of working.

CAR-T takes this a step further.

Instead of using a standard drug, CAR-T takes your own T cells and adds special tools so they can target your specific cancer. It is a very personal approach to medicine.

Who Can Get CAR-T?

CAR-T therapies are approved for certain blood cancers, such as:

• Lymphoma
• Multiple myeloma
• Leukemia

CAR-T is not the right choice for every person with these cancers. Whether you can get CAR-T depends on your exact diagnosis, past treatments, how your cancer responded, and your health. You do not have to figure this out alone. If your cancer came back or stopped responding to treatment, your doctor or our care team can check if CAR-T is an option for you.

Your Journey

CAR-T is not a regular medicine off the shelf. It is made custom using your own cells. Everyone’s journey is a bit different, but it usually follows these steps:

Health Check
Our team looks at your health, medical history, and past treatments to see if the therapy is a safe fit for you. This step includes blood tests and body scans.

Collecting T Cells
Your T cells are taken from your blood using a process called leukapheresis. A machine filters out the T cells it needs and safely returns the rest of your blood to your body.

Making Your Treatment
Your T cells travel to a special laboratory. Scientists add a special receptor (CAR) to the cells. This receptor helps the cells spot and bind to your cancer cells.

Then, the lab grows millions of these new cells. This step takes a few weeks. Your care team will guide you on how to manage your cancer while you wait.

Getting Ready
A few days before receiving your new cells, you get a short course of chemotherapy. This is called lymphodepleting chemotherapy. It clears space in your body so the new cells can grow and work best.

Receiving Your CAR-T Cells
Your customized CAR-T cells are given back to you through an IV infusion. Once inside, the cells start finding and destroying cancer cells.

Resting and Recovery
CAR-T creates a strong reaction in your body, so close monitoring after treatment is very important. For several weeks after your CAR-T dose, your care team, in collaboration with one or more identified patient caregivers, will help establish a monitoring program to watch for side effects, support your recovery, and track how well the treatment is working.

Why CAR-T Is Different

Most cancer treatments involve giving you standard drugs or radiation. CAR-T starts with your own body. Your own cells are trained to fight the cancer. This makes CAR-T fundamentally different from standard chemotherapy. For people with hard-to-treat blood cancers, CAR-T can offer long-lasting relief when other options have stopped working.

Advanced Care, Closer to Home

Despite its potential to produce long-lasting remissions—and even cures for some blood cancers—only about 1 in 5 eligible patients receives CAR-T therapy. Bringing this advanced cellular therapy closer to home can help remove one of the biggest barriers to treatment: access. In the past, patients in Maine who needed CAR-T therapy had to travel out of state to get it. That meant long trips and time away from family and friends when support was needed most.

NECS has changed that.

By offering CAR-T in Maine, NECS brings this advanced treatment right to our local community. Patients no longer have to travel far away to Boston to get high-level cancer care.

Beyond CAR-T: Targeted Care at NECS

CAR-T is part of a bigger change in how we treat cancer. At NECS, precision oncology means studying the specific traits of a cancer to pick the best way to treat it. Depending on your needs, care may include:

• Molecular and genomic testing
• Biomarker-driven treatment
• Targeted therapies
• Cellular therapies such as CAR-T
• Bispecific antibody therapies
• Radioligand and radiotheranostic therapies
• Clinical trials
• Other emerging treatments matched to the biology of an individual’s cancer

The more we learn about your cancer, the better we can target it. This goal guides everything we do — from testing and diagnosis to treatment and clinical trials.