CAR T cell therapy leads to 10-year remissions in B-cell lymphoma patients
A long-term follow-up from one of the earliest CAR T cell therapy clinical trials shows potential cures in more than one-third of patients treated at Penn Medicine.
Image: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
In the analysis of 38 patients from a phase II clinical trial (including 24 patients with large B-cell lymphoma and 14 with follicular lymphoma) conducted at Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center, no patients experienced a relapse after 5.4 years, and most relapses occurred within the first year after CAR T cell infusion, supporting the hypothesis that patients who experience a long-term response to CAR T cell therapy may be cured.
“As oncologists, we use the word ‘cure’ with great care, but I am increasingly confident that CAR T cell therapy has the potential to cure a meaningful number of patients with B-cell lymphomas,” says senior author Stephen J. Schuster, the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Professor in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Lymphoma Clinical Care and Research and director of Penn’s Lymphoma Program. “At the same time, our work is far from done. This therapy does not yet work for everyone, and we are committed to understanding why so we can continue to improve the next generation of CAR Ts.”
Patients with a longer response appeared to have higher levels of CAR T cells in their blood over the first two years after treatment, a finding consistent with reports of durable response to CAR T cell therapy in other cancer types. The persistence of CAR T cells also seemed to be more important than the early peak expansion of CAR T cells.
“We’re encouraged by the long-term remissions of these patients over the past decade,” says lead author Marco Ruella,an associate professor of hematology-oncology and scientific director of the Lymphoma Program. “Moving CAR T cell therapy into earlier lines of treatment—before patients experience the cumulative effects of chemotherapy—may be key to extending its curative potential.”
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