“It’s not just a handful of patients. It’s an expanding
number at multiple centers,” says Renier Brentjens, MD, PhD, an
oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who has spent 20
years researching ways to manipulate immune cells to fight cancer.
“That’s often an indication that you’re not looking at a one-patient
thing or a fluke. It really works in this disease.”
Since 2009, researchers at Sloan Kettering, the
University of Pennsylvania, and the National Cancer Institute have tried
this treatment on about 100 patients with ALL. More than 70 have gone
into complete remission. Results like this earned the treatment its
breakthrough status at the FDA.
“This is a very, very bad disease. The 3-year
overall survival after relapse is less than 10%,” Brentjens says. “Most
of the patients that we’ve seen for a 6-month visit after the T-cell
therapy are at or past what their expected survival was when they first
came into our clinic.”
Researchers continue testing modified T-cells in patients with other types of leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma -- all blood cancers. “The question is: Can we expand this technology to more common tumors? Colon cancer, ovarian cancer, breast cancer,” Brentjens says. Early research in this area says the answer could be “yes."
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