First patients of pioneering CAR T-cell therapy ‘cured of cancer’

Two of the first human patients to be treated with a revolutionary therapy that engineers immune cells to target specific types of cancer still possess cancer-killing cells a decade later with no sign of their illness returning.

The finding suggests CAR T-cell therapy constitutes a "cure" for certain blood cancers, although adapting it to treat solid tumours is proving more challenging.

CAR - chimeric antigen receptor - T-cell therapy works by genetically engineering an individual's T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells.

T-cells are a type of white blood cell that can recognise and destroy foreign cells, including cancer cells, but because cancer is very good at evading immune detection, they often miss their mark. CAR T-cells are engineered to make them better at detecting cancer cells.

In the UK the therapy is approved for use in children and young adults with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and adults with certain types of lymphoma - both are blood cancers.

In trials, CAR-T therapy has been extraordinarily successful, putting patients into remission who had months to live, but the long-term effects had not been extensively studied.

Now, Prof Carl June, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues report in Nature how cells from two of the first patients to be treated are faring 10 years on. Both patients were suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia when they had CAR-T therapy in 2010, and achieved complete remission within months of treatment, meaning all signs and symptoms of their leukaemia disappeared.