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Baylor College of Medicine News
3/23/2015
A clinical trial resulting from a decade of lab research has shown promise for a new type of immunotherapy treatment for patients with HER2-positive sarcoma (a tumor arising from bone and soft tissue) and may extend to other types of cancer, said researchers from the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital and Houston Methodist Hospital and from Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers. Their report appears in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“More than a decade ago, we devised a genetic approach to generate immune cells, called T cells, that are specific for HER2, an antigen (or protein) present on a broad range of cancers including breast cancer, sarcomas and brain tumors,” said Dr. Nabil Ahmed, associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor and a co-author of the study. “The approach relies on isolating T cells from cancer patients, growing them in the laboratory and genetically modifying them with HER2-specific chimeric antigen receptors (HER2-CARs). These HER2-CAR T cells are then infused back into patients and ‘seek out’ HER2-positive tumor cells and destroy them.”
Taking their research from the lab to the clinic, Ahmed and Dr. Stephen Gottschalk, professor of pediatrics at Baylor and co-author of the study, and their team embarked on a clinical study to establish the safety of their therapeutic approach. The study included 19 pediatric and adult patients with HER2-positive sarcoma who had failed conventional therapies. They received increasing doses of HER2-CAR T cells. Infusions of HER2-CAR T cells were well tolerated, and T cells ‘homed’ to tumor sites. Several patients had clinical benefit, and eight patients survived for more than one year after T cell infusion.
