It offers new hope for leukemia patients.
A new study suggests that a ready-to-use form of advanced cancer immunotherapy can successfully treat blood cancers. Scientists have developed an off-the-shelf version of CAR-based immune therapy that can be administered more quickly and easily to patients battling blood cancers.
This innovative therapy, which utilizes natural killer (NK) cells, led to complete remission in several individuals with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), according to research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Chicago. Dr. Stephen Strickland Jr., director of leukemia research at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, emphasized in a press release that the deep, lasting responses seen in patients are highly promising, offering hope for a new treatment option where few currently exist.
Traditional CAR T-cell therapy, which modifies a patient’s own T cells to target and destroy cancer cells, often requires significant laboratory time. This delay can be critical for patients with rapidly progressing leukemia. Furthermore, AML patients frequently have damaged T cells, complicating the process. The new approach, called CAR NK-cell therapy, sidesteps these issues by engineering NK cells from healthy donors. These cells can be prepared, frozen, and stored, allowing for rapid administration when needed without the lengthy personalization process.
Researchers tested a specific formulation, known as SENTI-202, which was designed to attack leukemia cells by recognizing two distinct surface proteins. In addition, a special “logic-gating” mechanism was built into the therapy to ensure that healthy cells expressing these proteins would not be harmed. In the initial trial involving nine patients with relapsed or treatment-resistant AML, four achieved complete remission and one entered a leukemia-free state. While these early results are encouraging, ongoing studies aim to further evaluate the safety and efficacy of SENTI-202.
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