A new but promising cell therapy is being developed by researchers has been proven effective in cutting the remission rate of advanced leukemia cases on both children and adults.
Carl June, lead researcher and a professor of immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has given the license of this new treatment to Swiss drugmaker Novartis. The drugmaker will be funding the next clinical trials within and outside the United States.
The cell therapy was created by extracting T-cells, or white bloods responsible for fighting infection, from the patients and altering them to fight the leukemia cells. The treatment is called “CARs” for chimeric antigen receptor.
The treatment was tested on 32 patients diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and 27 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). After the treatment, the researchers found that 47 percent of the CLL patients have reduced cancers while 22 percent showed remission. Those with ALL showed an 86 percent remission rate on children and 100 percent on adults.
“This cell therapy is showing a very promising remission rate in both adult and children with advanced leukemia where there is no therapy that works,” June said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. “It’s an exciting time.”
The remission duration of the patients was also promising. An 8-year-old ALL patient has been on remission for 20 months while the adult ALL patients has been on it for six months. There were relapses on other participants of the clinical trials three months after the treatment. Despite the reported relapse, researchers remained positive.
“It’s completely surprising because that disease kills you in weeks,” June said. “We thought that the response rate would be higher in CLL which takes years to kill you but it turns out it’s contrary to what we expected.”
June has presented the initial results of his study at the annual conference of the American Society of Hematology held in New Orleans.
