This Therapy Could Cure Acute Blood Cancer

A new clinical trial of a specific CAR T-cell therapy, the prodigal new therapeutic technique in immunotherapy, shows high remission rates among patients who have an aggressive blood cancer, with eight out of eleven participants being in complete remission.

“These responses are remarkable because the patients in this trial had run out of options,” explains first and corresponding author Professor Armin Ghobadi, from the Washington University School of Medicine. “They had very aggressive cancers return after several lines of therapy, including several who relapsed after an earlier stem cell transplant.”

Twenty-eight adult and adolescent participants took part in the clinical trial of the therapy WU-CART-007, which was produced from cells donated by a healthy individual and can be used to treat patients with T-cell cancers. Each participant either has T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia or T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. Of those 28, 15 were administered a dose escalation trial – meaning they were given increasing amounts of the new therapy to find the optimal dose – and 13 were given the full dose of 900 million CAR-T cells following lymphodepletion, a procedure meant to reduce the patients’ immune cells to make room for the therapeutic ones. Of the 11 people who completed the treatment, ten have seen their cancer disappear or significantly reduced, including eight who were in complete remission.