As immunotherapy has become the standard of care for a variety of cancers, one powerful type of immunotherapy has emerged for the treatment of blood cancers: CAR T-cell therapy. CAR T-cell therapy involves the removal and alteration of a patient’s own T-cells (immune system cells) to attack cancer cells in the blood. Once altered in a lab to recognize the cancer cells, the CAR T-cells are infused back into the patient’s bloodstream. While CAR T-cell therapy is approved for several forms of lymphoma, a study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute led to the first FDA approval of CAR T-cell therapy for mantle cell lymphoma.

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that is often not caught and diagnosed until the blood cancer has advanced to later stages. Curing MCL has historically been difficult or impossible with traditional cancer therapies. For this reason, the disease can be life-threatening, especially if the disease is resistant to chemotherapy, and the approval of CAR T-cell therapy is a major step forward for the treatment of MCL.

In the study conducted by Dana-Farber, the results showed CAR T-cell therapy to be a highly effective treatment for resistant forms of MCL. Of the 74 patients treated with the CAR T-cell therapy, 93% responded to the first infusion, and all signs of cancer disappeared in 67% of patients. Since these patients had exhausted other therapies, these results showed promise for patients with an otherwise poor prognosis.

The CAR T-cell treatment, called KTE-X19, can now be used to treat patients who have treatment-resistant or relapsed forms of MCL. Dana-Farber, which conducted the clinical trial used for FDA-approval, will now administer the treatment to MCL patients.