ISTOCK, DR_MICROBEResearchers report promising results in a Phase 1 trial testing a new cell therapy using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell technology on patients suffering from a treatment-resistant form of leukemia. The study, which successfully treated even cancers that had resisted a previous CAR T immunotherapy, was published in Nature Medicine yesterday (November 20).
B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common childhood cancer. Usually, it can be treated with chemotherapy, but sometimes patients suffer relapses or don’t improve after treatments such as chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants.
Cell therapy is a new approach to tackle these difficult forms of cancer. The first such drug, Kymriah, developed by Novartis, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration earlier this year for the treatment of lymphoblastic leukemia in cases where other types of treatment fail. The therapy involves extracting millions of a patient’s T-cells and genetically modifying them to destroy malignant cancer cells before returning them.
The modification introduces a chimeric antigen receptor that targets a specific protein molecule found on the surface of cancer cells—CD19—in leukemia and lymphoma. ...
