China News Service, Beijing, May 10 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature-Medicine" recently published a cancer research paper by a Chinese team that specifically targets a cancer in the gastrointestinal tract. CAR-T cell immunotherapy of a protein highly expressed in gastrointestinal tumors (CLDN18.2) was safe, with a response rate of 48.6% in patients with gastrointestinal cancer and 57.1% in patients with gastric cancer.
The findings, based on preliminary analysis in an ongoing Phase 1 clinical trial, suggest that CLDN18.2-specific CAR-T cell therapy may be a viable treatment for patients with digestive system cancers.
Patients with gastrointestinal cancers, including gastric and pancreatic cancers, often have poor prognosis and few treatments, the paper said.
CAR-T cell therapy (a type of immunotherapy that modifies a patient's T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells) has been approved for the treatment of blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, but CAR-T is not effective in the treatment of solid tumors such as gastric cancer. The potential in intestinal cancers) is unclear, as these types of cancers are difficult to target.
Based on this, Shen Lin, the corresponding author of the paper, Peking University Cancer Hospital, Beijing Institute of Cancer Prevention and Control, and colleagues present a preliminary analysis of an ongoing Phase 1 clinical trial in previously treated gastric cancer cells expressing CLDN18.2. CAR-T cells targeting CLDN18.2 were studied in intestinal cancer patients (37 patients in total, 28 with gastric or esophagogastric junction adenocarcinoma, and 5 with pancreatic cancer).
The study showed that overall, after the first infusion of CAR-T cells, the observed safety profile was acceptable, with an overall response rate and disease control rate of 48.6% and 73.0%, respectively, in all treated patients, and in gastric cancer patients. were 57.1% and 75.0%.
According to the authors of the paper, these results provide new insights into the application of CAR-T cells in the treatment of solid tumors.
But the final results of this trial and subsequent larger-scale trials are needed.
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