A new cell therapy developed by researchers from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has achieved a 90 percent complete remission rate in children and adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
Researchers developed hunter cells, or CTL019, using the patient's T cells through a gene transfer technique. The technique trains the cells to search and kill the tumor cells. Once infused in the patients, the cells multiply, providing as many as 100,000 new cells to do the work.
The study involved 30 children and adults, aged 5 to 60, who were treated in two hospitals. The results showed that 27 out of 30, or 90 percent, of the patients, achieved a complete remission, and 78 percent of them were still alive after six months of follow-up care. Prior to the treatment, these patients had experienced a relapse as many as four times, even after standard therapies and transplants.
"Their cancers were so aggressive they had no treatment options left," said the study's Senior Author, Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, a professor of Pediatrics in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine and director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "The durable responses we have observed with CTL019 therapy are unprecedented."
Researchers observed that the participants started experiencing cytokine release syndrome (CRS), a common immediate complication during infusion of anti-T cell antibodies, within a few days after the new therapy. This complication is a strong indication that the hunter cells have started attacking the cancer cells.
"We're astonished how well it turned out," Dr. Grupp told Reuters Health. "In our wildest dreams, we didn't think it would work as well as it did for the patients we've treated so far."
Grupp's team is satisfied with the results of the study, as the treatment showed effective in both children and adults. But, he admitted that adults might need more of the hunter cells because they are more difficult to treat than children.
The findings of the study were published in the Oct. 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
