CAR-T cell therapy still working a decade on!

In 2010 chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T-cell) therapy was very experimental.  It had only been tested in mice but two gentlemen who had nothing to lose opted for the experimental treatment.   Remarkably the treatment worked and proved to be their cure from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).

A study that followed the two CLL patients has just been published in the scientific journal Nature.

At ten years, both patients were still in sustained remission.  Remarkably the CAR T-cells remained detectable and made up 0.8% and 0.1% of all T cells in patient one and two respectively.

It is believed that CAR T-cell therapy will become a mainstay of treatment for many blood cancers and is currently approved in Australia for the treatment of some B-cell lymphomas and B-cell acute lymphocytic leukaemia.  At present CAR T-cell therapy is not approved for the treatment of CLL, but with results like this we hope that changes in the future.

If you would like to read more about the research, please click here.  You can read more about the two patients here.

Reference:  Melenhorst, J. J., Chen, G. M., Wang, M., Porter, D. L., Chen, C., Collins, M. A., Gao, P., Bandyopadhyay, S., Sun, H., Zhao, Z., Lundh, S., Pruteanu-Malinici, I., Nobles, C. L., Maji, S., Frey, N. V., Gill, S. I., Tian, L., Kulikovskaya, I., Gupta, M., … June, C. H.. (2022). Decade-long leukaemia remissions with persistence of CD4+ CAR T cells. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04390-6