A new treatment using “supercharged” immune cells appears to work against tumors in children with a rare type of cancer, researchers said Wednesday of a study conducted in Italy.
Nine of the 27 children in this Italian study showed no signs of cancer six weeks after treatment, although two relapsed and later died.
The treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, is already used to help the immune system fight leukemia and other types of blood cancers.
This is the first time that researchers have achieved such encouraging results in solid tumors, raising hopes that it can be used against other types of cancer, experts in the field revealed, quoted by the Associated Press (AP) agency.
However, it is still too early to consider this treatment a cure for neuroblastoma, a cancer of nerve tissue that usually begins in childhood in the adrenal glands near the kidneys in the abdomen.
Standard treatment can be intense, with chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy, depending on the stage of the cancer and other factors.
The children in the study had cancers that had come back or were particularly difficult to treat.
Eleven children were alive when the three-year study ended, including some who only partially responded to treatment and received repeat doses of the engineered cells.
“All of those children were destined to die without this therapy,” said Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania, a pioneer of CAR-T therapy who was not involved in the new research.
“No one has ever had patients react this way, so we just don’t know what it will be like a decade from now. There will definitely be more testing based on these exciting results,” he added.
CAR-T cell treatment harnesses the immune system to create “living drugs” capable of seeking out and destroying tumors.
‘T’ cells from the patient’s blood are collected and strengthened in the laboratory, and then returned to the patient intravenously, where they continue to multiply.
Six CAR-T cell treatments have been approved by the US Drug Administration (FDA) for blood cancers. Some patients were cured.
But success in solid tumors has been debatable, with the most recent study by researchers at the Vatican’s Bambino Gesu children’s hospital in Rome.
“It seems they have found a unique combination” to make the modified cells multiply initially and then last a long time to continue their work against cancer, explained Robbie Majzner, of Stanford University School of Medicine, who was not involved. in this.
Study co-author Franco Locatelli revealed that the researchers also added a safety switch to kill the cells if the patient had a severe reaction.
In the event that a patient had problems, the researchers flipped the safety switch and demonstrated that it worked, but later determined that the patient’s problem was caused by a stroke unrelated to CAR-T cells.
Many of the children had a common side effect with CAR-T therapy: an immune overreaction called “cytokine release syndrome.”
The researchers concluded that CAR-T therapy is “feasible and safe in the treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma.”
Source: TSF
