cell-therapy

After CAR-T the blood counts often take much longer to recover than after ordinary chemotherapy, and in some people they dip again weeks later after appearing to have recovered. Since 2023 this has had a name, ICAHT, and an agreed grading system, which matters because it means it is measured and reported rather than described loosely.

Boston lymphoma doctor who led ZUMA-5, the trial that brought the CAR-T therapy axicabtagene ciloleucel to relapsed follicular lymphoma.

CAR-T can cause a short-lived brain disturbance in the first weeks: confusion, trouble finding words, tremor, sometimes seizures. It almost always resolves. Afterwards, measured outcomes for most people are close to the general population, while a substantial minority report trouble with memory or concentration.

Led the Dutch-Danish trial that proved TIL therapy beats ipilimumab in melanoma, the first randomised win for a cell therapy in a solid tumour.

Created cord blood-derived CAR-NK cells, the first off-the-shelf CAR cell therapy to show remissions in lymphoma.

If you were given a treatment in which your own cells were genetically modified, you are expected to be followed up for fifteen years. Not because something is known to go wrong, but because the gene is inserted permanently and the only honest way to find out what happens over a lifetime is to look.

Cell therapy engineer whose CAR-TEAM cells produced rapid regressions of recurrent glioblastoma.

There is one licensed mesenchymal cell product in oncology and it is for one narrow use: children whose graft-versus-host disease has not responded to steroids. Everything else sold as a mesenchymal or stromal cell infusion for repair or rejuvenation is unlicensed and untested, and it is worth knowing the difference because the clinics rely on it being blurred.

Runs the laboratory that actually grows the cells. Her papers are the reason anyone outside the United States believed a hospital could manufacture tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes reliably.

Designed the second-generation CAR with a CD28 costimulatory domain that made CAR-T therapy work.

Runs a hospital department that makes its own CAR-T cells and gives them fresh, without freezing, at a fraction of what a commercial product costs.

Led the GD2 CAR-T trial in diffuse midline glioma and defined antigen density as a barrier to CAR-T in solid tumours.

Led SPEARHEAD-1, the trial that made afami-cel the first engineered TCR T-cell therapy approved for a solid tumour.

Led ZUMA-1, the trial that made axicabtagene ciloleucel the first CAR-T therapy approved for lymphoma.

In 2024 the US regulator added a warning to every approved CAR-T product about T-cell cancers after treatment. It says the risk applies to the class, that these can appear within weeks, and that patients should be monitored for life. It does not say CAR-T causes most of them, and published series find them very rare.

Treated the first child with CAR-T cells and led ELIANA, the trial behind the first CAR-T approval.

Led JULIET, which brought tisagenlecleucel, the first CAR-T, to adults with relapsed large B-cell lymphoma.

Delivered the first gene-edited off-the-shelf CAR-T cells to infants with leukaemia and the first base-edited CAR-T therapy.

The immunologist who, in 1989, first gave a T cell an antibody's aim. Every CAR-T product on the market descends from that experiment.