CAR T therapy has been successful in some acute blood cancers. Response rates, however, are considerably lower in CLL and solid tumours, with T cell exhaustion and antigen escape being shared issues. A potentially game-changing advance in solid tumour CAR T technology may therefore be relevant to CAR T therapy in CLL, and here is an example.
Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) report on a study in a mouse model. Solid tumours, implanted in the mice, were treated with two kinds of CAR T therapy: one, CAR T cells incorporating a gene fusion selected from the mutated T cells of T cell lymphoma patients; and two, control CAR T cells. While 2 million control cells had no effect on the mice tumours, only 20,000 of the engineered "cancer" cells were able to clear the cancer, and this remained the case more than a year later.
There are major caveats, of course. Firstly, this is research in mice, not humans. The researchers acknowledge that it could be two years before any clinical study commences. Secondly, although the potent CAR T cells used in this study were genetically engineered, they did originate from human cancer cells, and inevitably that raises safety concerns for future clinical research, especially in light of recent reports of secondary cancers following CAR T therapy healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...
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Readable article: insideprecisionmedicine.com...
Report in Nature, including link to podcast and paper in Nature nature.com/articles/d41586-...
YouTube video (sound only, first 11mins: 30sec only) youtube.com/watch?v=KO-Crvh...
Nature, paper 07 Feb 2014, abstract and paywalled full article nature.com/articles/s41586-...
FDA Investigating 'Serious Risk' of Malignancy After CAR-T Therapy - Applies to all approved therapies, but benefits still outweigh risks
A humorous look at CAR-T cell therapy
