Cancer therapy that engineers patient white blood cells to recognize and destroy tumors in their body posts impressive phase II result: 47% of patients experienced a complete remission, 5x better than current standard of care.

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Kite Pharma is a biotech company that manufactures CAR-T cells. Essentially, CAR-T cells are T-cells taken from a patient, engineered to recognize and destroy the patient's tumor, and then put back in the body to kill the cancer cells.

The CAR-T concept has been exciting researchers for several years now, but clinical studies were typically small and mostly focused on testing the safety of the technology. Last night, KITE Pharma released new data from their ongoing pivotal (meaning intended to be used to apply for FDA approval) phase II study using CAR-T cells in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. The results were very impressive. KTE-C19 (the CAR-T drug) met the primary endpoint of objective response rate (ORR), p < 0.0001, with an ORR of 76 percent, including 47 percent complete remissions (CR). Historically, standard of care has an 8% CR rate for these patients.

While very exciting, there are still several concerns with the technology: namely safety, and duration of remission.

A number of patients experienced adverse events related to the drug, and two died as a result of treatment. Additionally, while 47% of patients experienced a complete remission, some had relapsed three months later.

This is part of the Science Discussion Series, so I will try to check in intermittently during the day to help discuss this clinical trial, CAR-T cells and other cool technologies in the immunotherapy space.

">Cancer therapy that engineers patient white blood cells to recognize and destroy tumors in their body posts impressive phase II result: 47% of patients experienced a complete remission, 5x better than current standard of care.