A research study led by the University of Kansas suggests that the FDA-mandated monitoring period of diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy could be halved without harm to patients. Writing in the journal Blood Advances, first author Nausheen Ahmed, a researcher and hematologist…

A phase I clinical trial at Stanford Medicine has found that a new CAR-T cell therapy that targets a different protein—CD22—from the original therapy significantly improved patients’ outcomes. Over half of 38 people enrolled in the trial—37 of whom had already relapsed from the original CAR-T therapy—experienced a complete response…

AstraZeneca is acquiring cell therapy developer Gracell Biotechnologies Inc. for $1.2B. Gracell is focused on cancer and autoimmune diseases and, importantly, has a toehold in China. The biotech has ten programs in preclinical or later phases. Its most advanced candidate, GC012F, is in Phase I/II trials in the U.S. and…

A team of researchers from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE), Lausanne (UNIL), the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and the Vaud University Hospital (CHUV) in Switzerland have discovered how to prolong the functionality of CAR-T cells by inhibiting a specific metabolic mechanism. CAR-T cell immunotherapy, which involves taking immune cells from…

Moderna will partner with Chinese biotech CARsgen to co-develop a combined CAR T-cell and mRNA cancer vaccine therapy. The collaboration aims to combine Moderna’s Claudin18.2 mRNA cancer vaccine with CARsgen’s investigational Claudin18.2 autologous CAR T-cell product candidate (CT041) to test efficacy for targeting hard to treat cancers. Claudin 18.2 is…

Astellas and Poseida Therapeutics have announced a deal around Poseida’s MUC1C-ALLO1, an allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy in Phase I for multiple solid tumor indications. Astellas will invest a total of $50 million, including $25 million to acquire shares of common stock of Poseida at $3.00 per share in a private…

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, commonly referred to as CAR-T, has been an approved therapy for various forms of blood cancer. Now, evidence from a small clinical trial has indicated that a CAR-T adaptation could treat myasthenia gravis, a rare autoimmune disease of the nervous system. In the trial, the…

Researchers at the Medical University of Vienna have identified “exhausted” T cells in lymphoma patients as a potent biomarker that can be used to predict the success of CAR-T cell therapy in patients. In recent years, CAR-T cell therapy has been approved for lymphoma patients. CAR-T cells are lymphocytes taken from…

Candel Therapeutics, a clinical stage developer of viral immunotherapies, announced Wednesday that it will collaborate with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) Center for Cellular Immunotherapies to study the efficacy of using viral immunotherapies to help boost the effects of UPenn’s CAR-T cell therapies in solid tumor models. The…

Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), in Germany have successfully cured several patients suffering from severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) using genetically modified immune cells known as CAR-T cells. CAR T cells are immune cells taken from an individual patient and genetically engineered to express proteins known as CAR—chimeric antigen receptors—on…

Calibr, the drug discovery and development division of Scripps Research, reports positive Phase I results for its next generation switchable CAR-T cell therapy platform in patients with B cell cancers. In a presentation today at the CAR-TCR Summit in Boston, the researchers announced that six of nine patients treated with…

Biosimulation company Certara announced on Thursday that is has entered a two-year collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) to develop new biosimulation software aimed at improved CAR T-cell therapy dosing for multiple myeloma patients. “We are very pleased to work with MSK, a leading cancer hospital and research…

A new lab study shows additional treatment with interleukin 7 (IL-7) after CAR-T cell infusion makes the therapeutic cells grow in number and become more effective at tumor killing. The Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis team’s report was published today in Nature Communications. “Many researchers are trying different…

Harnessing the body’s own ability to seek and destroy cancer cells has been one of the most promising methods of treating cancer of the blood, like leukemia. The technology reprograms a type of immune cells, called T-cells, and then puts them back into the patient where they can do their…

Scientists have developed a new type of CAR-T cells that act as a “micropharmacy.” The cells co-express bacterial enzymes that activate prodrugs at the disease site, killing both tumor cells that contain the cancer marker as well as nearby cancer cells that do not. What’s more, the engineered cells can…