New CAR T treatment opens doors for kidney patients
An early Penn Medicine trial demonstrates CAR T cells can safely desensitize even the most challenging transplant candidates.
2 min. read
A pioneering clinical trial has successfully enabled two patients with end-stage kidney disease to receive previously improbable kidney transplants. These individuals were considered among the most difficult in the nation to match with a compatible donor kidney due to harmful antibodies they had developed (“sensitized”). Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine have used chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, originally developed at Penn for treatment of blood cancer, to significantly reduce the level of harmful immune antibodies in these two highly sensitized patients, making kidney transplantation possible after years of waiting. The study’s findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Philadelphia resident Andrew Boyd volunteered to participate in Penn Medicine’s pioneering CAR T study.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine)
“This is the first demonstration that CAR T cells can be used not only to treat cancer, but also to help patients who previously had no opportunity to receive a compatible donor kidney,” says Ali Naji, the Jonathan E. Rhoads Professor of Surgery and principal investigator of the study. “For patients who have spent years on the kidney transplant waiting list, this approach could be transformative.” Naji co-authored the study with Penn Medicine’s Vijay Garud Bhoj,Alfred L. Garfall, and Mary Kaminski.
Of the 91,000 people awaiting kidney transplant in the U.S., roughly 5,000 are “highly sensitized,” meaning their immune systems harbor extremely high levels of antibodies that would attack most donor kidneys. This Phase I clinical trial is the first to test whether dual CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment developed at Penn Medicine by Carl June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy, can safely remove the specific immune cells responsible for making anti-donor antibodies.
For more than four decades, Philadelphia resident Andrew Boyd has lived with kidney disease. At age 14, he received his first transplant in 1993 at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His second kidney transplant was in 2009, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He volunteered to participate in Penn Medicine’s pioneering study using CAR T-cell therapy to lower antibody levels in highly sensitized kidney patients. Beginning in early 2025, he underwent months of lab work, cell collection, and treatment, all while continuing the dialysis that was essential for him to stay alive. Within weeks of receiving his engineered immune cells back, his antibody levels began to fall. By August, Boyd, at age 47, received the news he once thought impossible: a viable kidney match had been found, and he received his third transplant at Penn Medicine.
“To have this kind of innovation happening right in my backyard at Penn—it’s hard to put that gratitude into words,” Boyd says. “I’m here today because a team believed in me, fought for me, and pushed science forward. They gave me a second chance at life … again.”
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