At the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) this month progress was reported on experimental drugs that awaken the power of the immune system to destroy cancers. Notably, Kite Pharma Inc., Novartis and Juno Therapeutics, all said they hope for initial approvals in the next year or so for CAR-T treatment – chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies that infuse modified cells from a cancer patient back into the body to stimulate the production of the body’s natural disease fighting cells.
Several ACGT Research Fellows, such as Drs. Michel Sadelain (MSK) and Hyam Levitsky with Juno Therapeutics, and Drs. Carl June (U Penn) and Glenn Dranoff with Novartis, have been researching this form of immunotherapy for years with increasingly remarkable results.
Emily Whitehead was the first pediatric patient successfully treated with CARTs at the University of Pennsylvania by Dr. June.
University of Pennsylvania scientists reported a 79% response rate at 12 months in children with ALL who received CTL019, which they are developing with Novartis, and 15 of 30 adult patients with NHL who got the treatment experienced complete remissions.
Juno reported that in a phase I/II trial of its CART, JCAR014, in 34 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) all achieved complete remissions; and Kite reported that three out of seven patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) were still in remission nine months after receiving its CART, KTE-C19
All three companies are looking seriously at a variety of techniques for optimizing the production of CARTs, the methods of administering them to patients, and ways to extend the technology to other cancers. “Are solid tumors something that CARTs will be amenable to? We think they can be,” says Usman Azam, global head of the cell and gene therapies unit at Novartis. “Solid tumors present a lot of challenges, but that’s the next wave of innovation.”