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Immunotherapy for cancer has had some dramatic short-term victories (NEJM JW Gen Med Jun 16 2015). But how durable are those successes? Investigators from the University of Pennsylvania who pioneered one form of immunotherapy — chimeric antigen-receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy — now report 10-year remissions in two patients with aggressive chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), who were among the first to be treated with CAR T-cell therapy.
In CAR T-cell therapy, a cancer patient's T cells are engineered in a laboratory dish to contain a receptor that binds to specific antigens on the surface of that patient's tumor cells. These “personalized,” engineered CAR T cells then are grown in large numbers and reinfused into the patient, where they bind t…