One of the great advances in cancer treatment in recent years has been the development of immunotherapy, which takes advantage of the patient’s own immune system to combat the disease.
Among the different approaches used, one of them consists of extract lymphocytes to genetically modify them so that they recognize and attack cancer cells and then reintroduce them into the patient, what is known as CAR-T. These therapies have achieved important results in hematological tumors, although they were not effective in solid tumors. However, this is changing recently.
“Yeah we begin to have positive results in solid tumors. For example, there are already trials where there are objective response rates in about 50% of patients. A few years ago our doubt was whether this approach was going to work or not. Now we know that they do it and we are working to improve them,” he explains. Sonia Guedanleader of the Cellular Immunotherapies Research Group for cancer at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), in Barcelona.
These data and more about how CAR-Ts and other cellular therapies, such as TILs or NK cells, are being developed, have been the focus of the I VHIO-BBVA Foundation International Symposium on Cellular Therapies in Oncology. This has been held these days in Barcelona and Sonia Guedan has been one of its organizers, along with Alena Groshead of the Tumor Immunotherapy and Immunology Group at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO).
One of the solid tumors in which research with CAR-T therapies is most advanced is HER2-positive breast cancer. Although it is a rare tumor, it is very aggressive and until recently its prognosis was not good. The research carried out has served to have more and more tools for its treatment and it now seems that CAR-T will be the next addition. “We are carrying out several projects seeking optimization. Among the lines we are following, one of them focuses on seeing if its combined use with PD-L1 inhibitors can help us increase its effectiveness,” explains Guedan.