New Biological Insights and Recent Therapeutic Advances in the Management of Acute and Chronic Leukemias and Myelodysplastic SyndromesMagnitude of clinical responses observed with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy in ALL
2:19 minutes.
TRANSCRIPTION:
DR SCHIFFER: It’s amazing. I think we forget how important T-cells are and how quickly they can do things. But in retrospect we shouldn’t be forgetful, because they were designed to hit viruses and infections and do it very, very quickly. But with blinatumomab, you see responses. And with CAR Ts, one of the major clinical problems is actually they react so strongly and instantly with the target that the major initial clinical problem is managing cytokine release. And we’ve figured out how to do that with steroids and sometimes IL-6 inhibitors. But along with the parallel work that’s been done with PD-1 and what not, it’s just a wakeup call as to where I think the answer to cancer is going. The CAR T-cells seem to be a formidable thing to do, but in fact industry has gotten involved with this simply because of the quality and magnitude of the responses. It requires a phoresis, sending off the T-cells to have them engineered. There are going to be different targets. There are going to be different ways of engineering the T-cells. But there’s absolutely no question about how profound these responses are. And then the issue is going to be just like with blinatumomab and inotuzumab in ALL, how to insert them into therapy. DR LOVE: Wendy, any comments about the responses that have been seen? DR STOCK: As Charlie said, the responses are nothing short of completely remarkable. The response rates are in the 80% to 90% range, complete response rates. And amazingly, all of those responses, or nearly all of them, are molecularly negative. That is, they’ve achieved eradication of minimal residual disease. And the median time to response in these trials is about 3 weeks, so it’s really quite incredible. |