Supersizing adoptive T cell therapies

Despite the striking efficacy of chimeric antigen receptor-based T cell therapies in small clinical trials in patients with leukemia, the ability to rapidly provide T cells to a large number of recipients is limited by the lack of readily available tumor antigen-associated human T lymphocytes. To tackle this problem, a Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center team has incorporated patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells into an immunotherapy protocol to provide large-scale production of T cells endowed with enhanced antitumor properties.¹

The team was led by Michel Sadelain, director of MSKCC's Center for Cell Engineering. He also led the teams that produced second-generation CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-expressing T cells that efficiently induced complete remission in five of five patients with chemotherapy-refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).²...