Dr Michael Green: Further Research Is Needed to Better Understand CAR T-Cell Exhaustion

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell exhaustion likely stems from patients undergoing several rounds of chemotherapy prior to transplant, noted Michael R. Green, PhD, associate professor of lymphoma and myeloma and director, Translational and Laboratory Research, Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma, Division of Cancer Medicine, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Transcript

How will you continue to investigate CAR T-cell exhaustion in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma?

I think one thing that we've become interested in as a result of the study is really understanding the origin and nature of T-cell exhaustion that we've observed in the infusion products. Our hypothesis is that this probably originates from the apheresis product and is a consequence of these patients being highly pretreated, undergoing going several rounds of chemotherapy, because they're a highly refractory and relapsed population.

So I would like to understand more about the factors that that lead to CAR T-cell exhaustion, so that we can hopefully address them either during manufacturing or maybe selecting patients better for autologous products, maybe selecting out patients that may benefit more from an allogeneic product, [which] are currently looking good in clinical trials.

There's several lines of questioning around the origin nature of CAR T-cell exhaustion or T-cell exhaustion generally.