What are the latest advancements and future directions in the development of CAR T-cell therapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma?
There's multiple efforts to improve on this. What we have right now are what we call as the second generation CAR-Ts. So that is much more advanced in the third and fourth and fifth generation CARs. Just like any other car we drive. Every year there are new models and new stuff that comes. So advances in bioengineering are going to give us better and improved CARs. At every stage, we can do better. So right now, one of the hiccups is this manufacturing time so you can come down in the manufacturing time. There are efforts to see if the CAR T-cells can be made inside the patient's body. That means the patient themselves acts as the manufacturing zone for CAR-T. So just introducing a virus or like a small dose of T-cells into the body, and then they replicate inside the body. So then you can avoid the 3 to 4 weeks. So that's a thing in motion. There are newer constructs of CAR-T cells not just targeting CD19 as axi-cel and liso-cel do, but targeting multiple targets 19 and 20 or targeting CD22. So we have clinical trials exploring this in multiple, time points for lots of lymphomas. There are CAR-T cells being looked at in the frontline setting. We have clinical trials for that. The T-cells are not the only immune cells that can be genetically engineered to attack lymphoma. So we have trials looking at other cells like NK cells. Then why restrict the CAR-T manufacture using only the patient cells? We can use a healthy donor cells or allogeneic CAR-T cells. Those are also being explored in clinical trials. So the sky's the limit with genetic engineering. And CAR-T cells are going beyond cancer. And do other indications like autoimmune disease, infection, even aging. So, the next decade is going to come with a lot of discovery and science, and we will have better, effective and safer CARs for sure for multiple indications in the future.
HealthTree • November 26, 2024