26 November 2025

Furious CARS take on formidable foe: Is CAR-T Cell therapy the next great hope in prostate cancer treatment?

By Tim Baker, an award-winning author, surf journalist and stage 4 prostate cancer survivor who now champions patient advocacy, sharing his story to support other men and their families facing prostate cancer.

It sounds deceptively simple. Develop a better prostate cancer treatment by super charging the body’s own natural killer T-Cells (CAR-T Cells) to recognise and attack cancer cells. And at the same time, weaken the cancer cells’ defences so the CAR-T cells can do a better job of vanquishing their foe.

To simplify even further, based on a short animation explaining the Furious Cars research project, scientists are aiming to give CAR-T Cells swords to make them more effective, and to take away the cancer cells’ shields to render them more vulnerable to attack. CAR (Chimeric Antigen Receptor) T cells are cells that are genetically engineered in a laboratory so they can bind to cancer cells and kill them.

This kind of immunology, using the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, has been successful with some blood cancers but has proven largely ineffective for prostate cancer until now.

Of course, this research is anything but simple, though early results are encouraging enough that the research team are genuinely excited by the potential. “What’s truly captured our excitement from the start is the incredible promise of this new therapy—it’s the kind of breakthrough that sparks real hope,” says Prof Renea Taylor, from Monash University’s Prostate Cancer Research Group, and member of the Furious Cars research team.

In the lab, they’ve seen a tumour completely vanish from CAR-T Cell therapy, an encouraging enough result early on to inspire the team to keep going. “To see this magnitude of response with a new and untested therapy, is extremely rare; that’s why we were so excited about pursuing its potential,” says Prof Taylor.

“The other point is that the response we see in that tumour is highly reproducible. We have done the same experiment six to eight times, and every time the response is just as robust. That tells us that it is was not a 'once off' and the biology is true - again, providing us with a model to explore and get the perfect formula. Doing it in every single patient and doing it safely is the goal.”

Furious Cars brings together expertise from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (Professors Gail Risbridger, Renea Taylor and Daniela Lossener), Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Professor Phil Darcy), the Garvan Institute (Professor Paul Timpson) and ANZUP Clinical Trials and Monash’s Eastern Health Clinical School (Professor Ian Davis). The team is a dynamic blend of researchers, each bringing their unique superpowers to the table—individually impressive, but unstoppable together. Like pieces of a puzzle, their strengths interlock to confront challenges that no one discipline could conquer alone.

The debilitating impacts of the current frontline treatment for prostate cancer, hormone therapy (or Androgen Deprivation Therapy), makes the impetus to come up with new treatment options more urgent. “Importantly this is a non-hormonal treatment, so we are eager to explore its untapped potential,” says Prof Taylor.  

“We’re always looking for the next breakthrough - the next lifeline - for when current treatments stop working, and the technology in this space is moving really, really quickly. The challenge is to deliver it in a way that is safe and efficient for patients. We’ve seen curative treatments in blood cancers. Patients with blood cancers are alive thanks to CAR-T cell therapy.”

The Furious Cars team are confident of getting the treatment to clinical trials stage, and are focussed on how best to deliver it, how to reduce toxicity and side effects of treatment. At the same time, they are exploring how best to engineer CAR-T Cells (the sword) and modify the tumour microenvironment or TME (the shield).

“You put T Cells next to prostate cancer cells in the petri dish, and they destroy them – it’s incredible to watch. But the real challenge is getting past the body’s powerful defences, breaking through the barriers that protect the cancer. It’s a fight at every step, but one we’re determined to win,” says Prof Taylor. The solution the Furious Cars team is exploring is to modify the tumour microenvironment with a single dose of the chemotherapy drug Carboplatin, which softens the physical barriers and renders the cancer cells more vulnerable to the CAR-T Cells.

“Used in a short window it can break down that tumour microenvironment,” says Prof Taylor. “We’re exploring around 15 other clinically approved agents that could have the power to break down this shield, and it’s incredibly exciting to see the possibilities. Our focus now is figuring out which ones are the most effective for different types of tumours - because not all tumours respond the same way. If we get it right, we believe this approach will eventually benefit people with other cancer types, not just prostate cancer.”

One of the Furious Cars’ team’s strengths is the collaborative and collegiate spirit to achieve their shared goals. “There’s no one competing, we all have different skills, and we all want to answer the same questions. It’s a very equal collaboration. And people give generously of their time. It’s not the only thing we’re working on, but this is a priority project for us all.”

And there are other challenges the team are tackling. “CAR-T cells are incredibly challenging to produce, costly to make, and often very tough for patients to tolerate,” says Prof Taylor. “With rapid advances in technology, we believe there will soon be opportunities for safe delivery. If the patient’s having an adverse response, we can potentially stop the treatment.”

Clinical trials in the US have run into challenges with toxicity and side effects and so trials are being redesigned with patient welfare as the top priority. “There’s a huge inflammatory response induced by the CAR-T cells. The immune system takes a big knock ... We’re not yet at a place we’re patients feel great after CAR-T cells therapy.”

One promising advance involves the engineering of CAR-T Cells inside the body, instead of having to remove them and re-introduce them, simplifying the process and making it easier for patients to tolerate. This is made possible by cutting edge medical technology, innovations in mRNA lipid nanoparticles (mRNA-LNPs) for delivery, combined with CRISPR-based gene editing.

Given the prevalence of prostate cancer (now Australia’s most common cancer), the lack of curative treatments for advanced prostate cancer, and the brutal side effects of existing treatments, there is understandable excitement about this work. 

Prostate cancer treatment has been likened to being a frog on a lilypond, hopping from one treatment to the next as each becomes ineffective, until you run out of treatment options. “It’s a message of hope. This new technology is coming, we’ve got the opportunity so it becomes a reality. It is quite an exciting field, this is a new lily pad, and it’s adaptable to other applications.”