Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is an emerging form of immunotherapy that leverages the strength of a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer.
Immune cells called T-cells are extracted from the patient’s blood and modified in the laboratory to produce chimeric antigen receptors, surface-level proteins that enable the T-cells to recognize and fight targeted antigenic tumor cells. The newly engineered T-cells are then cultivated in a lab before infusion back into the patient’s body, where they further multiply and go to work attacking cells that possess the antigen that they were programmed to destroy.
At the OncLive State of the Science Summit on Treatment of Hematologic Malignancies, Dr. John Leonard, who served as co-chair for the May 4 event, expressed promise in the use of CAR T-cell therapy for patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), in particular.
Dr. Leonard said that in a small group of clinical trial recipients with ALL, the immunotherapy has produced excellent, seemingly durable responses, and more data on CAR T-cells for patients with hard-to-treat lymphomas, like resistant forms of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), are forthcoming.
While patient selection is a crucial part of interpreting the data and planning for the future, Dr. Leonard believes that the main challenges in the development of CAR T-cell therapy relate to factors of patient selection such age, comorbidities, and aggressive cancers with prohibitive wait times for engineered cells, which can take as long as several weeks depending on the specific CAR product being used.
“I think there’s no doubt that some patients benefit, but at least in the near-term, it’s going to be a relatively small number of patients that will get CAR T-cells for lymphoma,” he said.
Check out what else Dr. Leonard had to say about CAR T-cells in this video from OncLive:
New Developments in Lymphoma 