Runners and riders, jumpers and fallers in the race to CAR-T

Most treatment plans for cancer have been based on a combination of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and in the past decade, drugs such as trastuzumab and imatinib, which target molecular changes observed in cancer cells1. For patients diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a form of cancer that is marked by overproduction of lymphoblasts (immature white blood cells, also called leukemic blasts), which prevents the bone marrow from producing normal blood cells, chemotherapy remains the principal form of treatment2. Two recently developed drugs offer a potential new solution: chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, or CAR-T.

Cancer immunotherapy breakthroughs