Explainer: What ’s behind FDA’s concern that a cancer-fighting cell therapy can also cause the disease?

Cancer treatments that harness the immune system to fight the disease have revolutionized its care in recent years. One strategy, chimeric antigen receptor T cell, or CAR-T, therapy, is a personalized treatment that engineers a cancer patient’s own immune cells to target and destroy their malignant cells. Several such lifesaving treatments are on the market for blood cancers and others are in clinical trials for many cancer types, including solid tumors. Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) surprised the CAR-T community by announcing that it’s investigating blood cancer cases apparently caused by CAR-T therapy. Until now, such a hazard for the approved treatments hadn’t been recognized. “This is very unexpected,” says CAR-T researcher Michel Sadelain of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). FDA hasn’t placed restrictions on CAR-T therapy, but the agency’s revelation left confusion in its wake. Science Insider talked to researchers in the field to understand their questions, what’s known, and what comes next. What’s the news? In a statement, FDA said it has received reports of a type of blood cancer —specifically, malignancies that start in immune cells called T cells and can include leukemias or lymphomas—arising in patients who received CAR-T therapy. The agency noted that it’s investigating this “identified risk.” The announcement posted on FDA’s website was first re...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research