Dr. Papa on the Impact of CAR T Cell Trial in Head and Neck Cancer

Sophie Papa, PhD, MBBS, MRCP, medical oncologist, Clinical Academic Group, Department of Research Oncology, King’s College London, discusses the impact of a recent study of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

In this study, T4 immunotherapy was used, which are T cells that are retroviral transduced to co-express T1E28ζ, a CAR coupling an ErbB ligand derived from EGF and TGFα to a fused CD28+CD3ζ endodomain, and 4αβ, a chimeric cytokine receptor containing the IL-4Rα ectodomain coupled to the IL-2Rβ endodomain.

These findings have shown that there is a 63% disease control rate, meaning 5 out of 8 patients evaluable at 6 weeks had stable disease, Papa says.

This is good news, Papa adds, as these results show that this therapy is essentially nontoxic, personalized therapy for patients who have this vey lethal form of cancer.