A new CAR-T therapy developed by London scientists has shown promise in treating an aggressive form of blood cancer.
CAR-T therapies work by reprogramming a patient’s immune cells to attack cancer and have been hailed as potentially “transformative”.
The FELIX trial, led by researchers at University College London (UCL) and University College London Hospital (UCLH), has assessed the potential of a new CAR-T therapy against a form of acute leukaemia called r/r B-ALL, which can cause bone marrow failure and death if left untreated.
Standard treatment is with chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant, but for most patients the cancer does not respond to treatment or relapses.
For the study, researchers tested a new CAR-T therapy called obecabtagene autoleucel (obe-cel) on 127 adult patients whose cancer had either not responded to treatment or returned after treatment.
The treatment works by reprogramming the body’s immune T-cells to produce an artificial protein on their surface, directing them to specifically recognise cancer cells.
Three-quarters of participants (74.7 per cent) were in remission after treatment, the study found.
Using the trial data, the team estimated that after six months, two-thirds (65.4 per cent) of patients with r/r B-ALL would be alive and disease-free if they received obe-cel, with 49.5 per cent alive and disease-free after 12 months.
Previous CAR-T treatments have been associated with severe side effects including cytokine release syndrome, which happens when the immune system responds to immunotherapy drugs more aggressively than it should. It can cause fever, muscle pain and dizziness and requires prompt treatment.
But the trial found that just 2.4 per cent of patients using obe-cel developed severe cytokine release syndrome, compared to 24 per cent who used an older CAR-T therapy.
Dr Claire Roddie, lead investigator of the FELIX trial from UCL Cancer Institute and UCLH, said: “While we have a licensed CAR-T therapy to treat r/r B-ALL in the UK, high toxicity is an issue in around a quarter of patients and lack of CAR-T persistence in the blood can lead to relapse and the requirement for more lines of therapy, including stem cell transplant.
“In contrast, our results from the FELIX study demonstrate that obe-cel can induce durable remissions with substantially fewer toxicity issues, which is great news for patients with what has historically been a very difficult cancer to treat.”
