CANCER DIGEST – May 2, 2022 – Researchers at Massachusetts General Cancer Center have developed a new strategy for making CAR T therapy more effective against the most common form of leukemia in adults.
CAR T therapy stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, and involves engineering cancer-killing T cells to more specifically recognize cancer cells by the quantity of certain proteins on the cell surface called antigens. CAR T cells can be engineered to target antigens that are either unique to cancer cells or are present in much greater numbers on normal cells than on malignant cells.
While CAR T therapy has been a breakthrough treatment for acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (ALL) and B-cell lymphomas, it has been much less effective for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) because the potential of wiping out not just the cancerous myeloid cells but also healthy infection-fighting ones, which can be devastating, leaving a person without the ability to fight off infections.
To overcome this difficulty, Mark Leick, MD and a team of researchers in the Cellular Immunotherapy program at MGH Cancer Center engineered CAR T cell that target an antigen called CD70, which is present in larger numbers on AML cells than on normal myeloid cells.
Then by adding an FDA-approved drug (azacitidine) the team was able to expand the number of targeted CD70 antigens on tumor cells, and by developing a way to help the T cells bind more strongly to them, the researchers were able to increase the efficiency of the therapy to kill cancerous myeloid cells.
“We were able to show that through the combination of the two, we got better killing of the tumor cells,” Leick said in a press release.
The researchers described their work in the April 21 journal Cancer Cell. The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes od Health, American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Swiss National Science Foundation and Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation.
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