“Immunotherapy is now really providing hope to a lot of patients with cancers that were not really responding to our standard chemotherapies,” Sabel said.
CAR T-cell therapy previously has been used to treat lymphoma and lymphocytic leukemia, Lichtenfeld said.
Zhao and his colleagues decided to try the therapy to treat multiple myeloma. They re-engineered the patients’ T-cells and then reintroduced them to the body in three infusions performed within one week.
Multiple myeloma is a cancer that occurs in plasma cells, which are mainly found in bone marrow and produce antibodies to fight infections. About 30,300 people will likely be diagnosed with multiple myeloma this year in the United States, researchers said in background notes.
“Multiple myeloma is a disease that historically was fatal in the course of a couple of years,” Lichtenfeld said. During the past two decades, new breakthroughs have extended survival out 10 to 15 years in some patients, he noted.
To date, 19 of the first 35 Chinese patients have been followed for more than four months, researchers report.
Fourteen of those 19 patients have reached the highest level of remission, researchers report. There hasn’t been a relapse among any of these patients, including five followed for more than a year.
“That’s as far as you can go in terms of driving down the amount of tumor that’s in the body,” Lichtenfeld said.