Long-lived immune cells show promise against cancer in world-first trial
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Conventional CAR T cells (purple and yellow spheres; artificially coloured) attack a cancer cell.Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library
The first clinical trial to test the tumour-fighting power of a stem-cell-like class of long-lived immune cells suggests that they could be more potent and less toxic than the standard mix of cells used in therapies for cancer.
The study, published in Cell on 30 April1, was small, and larger trials are needed to establish the treatment’s effectiveness. But the early results are promising: of 11 people with difficult-to-treat blood cancers, 5 entered remission after receiving a treatment called CAR-T-cell therapy that contained an unusually high proportion of immune cells with properties similar to stem cells.
This formulation was effective at lower doses than normal CAR-T-cell therapy and produced milder side effects. “On a per-dose basis, these cells definitely seemed more potent,” says Christine Brown, who studies cancer immunotherapy at City of Hope, a cancer treatment centre and research institute in Duarte, California, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a first step, but an important one.”
Many flavours
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies reprogram immune cells called T cells to target and kill cancer cells. To make these complex, living drugs, researchers normally isolate T cells from the recipient’s blood and then genetically engineer them to express a protein that binds to cancer cells. But T cells come in a variety of flavours, each with unique functions, and CAR-T-cell therapies normally contain a mixture of them.
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