Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, March 21 (Reporter Zhang Mengran) According to a cancer research report published in the British journal "Nature Medicine", a phase II clinical trial conducted by American scientists showed that the early development of the treatment called axi-cel can make 37 78% of patients with high-risk large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) activated complete responses.

axi-cel is a CAR-T immunotherapy that specifically targets the surface protein CD19 of cancerous B cells.

The results of the study show that this type of CAR-T cell therapy shows better safety, and it is used early for treatment or has more clinical benefits than general use.

　　LBCL is a blood cancer characterized by mutations in specific genes and/or a range of different clinical features.

Patients with high-risk LBCL generally respond poorly to the standard initial rounds of chemoimmunotherapy.

axi-cel is a type of CAR-T cell therapy that modifies a patient's own immune cells (in this case, T cells) in the laboratory so that they can better recognize and fight cancer cells.

axi-cel, which targets the surface protein CD19 expressed by cancerous B cells, has been approved for use in B-cell lymphoma patients in the late stages of treatment.

However, its potential as an initial therapy in high-risk LBCL patients has been under investigation.

　　University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center researcher Setava Nilap and colleagues used axi-cel in a phase II clinical trial in 40 high-risk adult patients with LBCL (median age 61 years, 68% male) initial treatment.

This is a single-arm clinical trial, meaning that all study subjects received the treatment.

Of the 37 patients included in the efficacy analysis, 78% achieved a complete response, the trial's primary outcome.

At the time of data cutoff, the median follow-up time was 15.9 months (median duration of response, progression-free survival, and event-free survival were not yet reached).

Adverse safety events were consistent with previous reports of axi-cel therapy.

　　These results support the researchers to further test the role of CD19-targeting CAR-T cells in the early stages of disease treatment.

However, large randomized trials are still needed to conduct direct comparisons with standard chemoimmunotherapy.