Construction is well underway for University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center Wesley Center for Immunotherapy. Named in honor of Kimberly and Joseph Wesley, who donated $10 million to support groundbreaking research and bring new, life-extending immunotherapy treatments to patients, the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy is expected to open in fall 2022.

The Wesley Center for Immunotherapy will be expanding 3,600-square-feet from the existing cellular manufacturing facility space, giving UH more space to create novel cellular immunotherapies and treatments for patients enrolled in clinical trials. In addition, the center will house immunotherapy research labs.

Transformational Care

Immunotherapy is the process of empowering a patient’s own immune system to identify and attack cancer cells. Clinical trials have shown increased rates of remission and survival as well as decreased side effects compared to conventional chemotherapy.

UH is proud to offer CAR T-cell therapy, an FDA-approved immunotherapy that uses the body's own T-cells, a type of white blood cell, to fight cancer. This therapy shows promise in treating certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and multiple myeloma that have relapsed or have been resistant to other types of cancer treatment.

UH’s cellular manufacturing facility generates CAR T, NK cell and other cell-based therapies on-site at UH Seidman Cancer Center, which enables patients to have access to the latest therapies more quickly. Today, UH experts are creating cells for treatment in just eight days, down from an average of 12 to 30 days in commercially available CAR T-cell therapy trials. This innovation allows UH Seidman physicians to deliver therapy in a timely manner and to more patients than would otherwise be possible.

Looking to the Future

Of the 31 patients who have completed immunotherapy trials by receiving UH generated CAR T cells, there’s been an overall response rate of 85 percent and a 70 percent rate of complete remission shared Ted Teknos, MD, President and Chief Scientific Officer of UH Seidman Cancer Center, Jane and Lee Seidman Chair in Cancer Innovation. “UH is one of less than a dozen academic medical centers to have successfully manufactured CAR T cells for human use, and is the cornerstone of the nation’s only National Center for Regenerative Medicine.”

Recently, a team led by UH Seidman Cancer Center researcher and scientist Reshmi Parameswaran, PhD, has developed and validated a new CAR T therapy that triples the targets on cancer cells – a “back up” approach that promises to greatly reduce the potential for cancer cells to evade the therapy and create potentially fewer side effects for patients. Her research was recently published in the journal
Nature Communications.

Dr. Parameswaran says her team looks forward to the opening of the new Wesley Center for Immunotherapy and hopes the new space will allow for her team to discover other novel approaches to the quickly emerging therapy.

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