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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Researchers look to make immunotherapy more affordable
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2017-01-19 18:00:00
	Description:		Immunotherapy is the future of cancer treatment. Wendell Lim, a molecular scientist of the University of California, San Francisco, says he is very optimistic about its success, but the caveat is - the cure comes at a price. "Currently the therapies use patient's own T cells and modify those. And what's good about that is you won't get an immune reaction against those T cells because they come from you. But that's highly customized and that's part of what makes therapy more expensive." Researchers are looking for ways to make the therapy more affordable so everyone who needs it could pay for it. "One of the things that people in the field are working on hard is to develop more off-the-shelf cells – that you might have a cell that comes from either a universal donor, or has been generated from stem cells that is compatible with a certain patient, just the way that an organ would be matched". Lim hopes more funds to tackle this cost savings will be available through the Moonshot Initiative, a project that Vice President Joseph Biden spearheaded to accelerate cancer research.
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