Last December, scientists at Juno Therapeutics reported at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting that, in an ongoing Phase 1 trial, its chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, JCAR015, put 24 of 27 adults with refractive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) into remission, with six patients remaining disease free for more than a year (ASH 2014, Abstract 382, 2014). This disease is extremely hard to treat and progresses rapidly when it becomes refractory; most patients die within a few months. “This response rate is unprecedented for patients who had stopped responding to all other treatments,” says Michel Sadelain, a founding director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Cell Engineering and a cofounder of Juno.
Founded just a year earlier, the Seattle-based company now has four CD19-targeting CAR T-cell therapies in trials. The premise is simple: extract a patient’s T cells from blood and train them to recognize and kill cancer ...
