Over the last decade chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies have demonstrated success in hematologic malignancies such as certain acute leukemias and lymphomas, yet they have struggled to gain traction in advanced solid tumours.

What can we learn from the ASCO Breakthrough meeting in Japan?

There are many reasons for this, not least are overcoming issues such as physical barriers, a hostile tumour environment, tumour heterogeneity, on-target, off-tumour toxicities, immune escape, difficulty in trafflicking and homing to the lesions, limited CAR-T cell persistence and exhaustion, etc.

It’s not all bad news though because there’s one tumour type where we are making some progress with CAR-T cells, namely gliomas.

What’s interesting is there has been a variety of tumour-associated antigens investigated in gliomas, including B7-H3, EGFRvIII, GD2, HER2, and IL–13Rα2.

Last week some new CAR-T cell therapy data of interest was presented at the ASCO Breakthrough meeting in Yokohama, Japan.

In this review we look at high grade gliomas in adults to explore how some new data against one target stacks up with what we’ve recently see reported for other targets. We also discuss future directions and where the field might be headed for further new product developments…

To learn more from our latest oncology review and get a heads up on key cancer research insights, subscribers can log-in or you can click to gain access to BSB Premium Content.

This content is restricted to subscribers

Posted by