ASAN Medical Center holds study for safety of new CAR T-cell Therapy

The study showed an overall response rate of 91.7% for administering the new treatment AT101.

ASAN Medical Center has conducted a study for verification of the efficacy and safety of a new CAR T-cell Therapy.

A team at Asan Medical Center has examined 12 patients with B-cell lymphoma for nine months, all of whom were either intractable for treatment or had relapsed but were illegible for other standard treatment options.

Patients were grouped by dose level – DL-1, DL-2, and DL-3 groups. The application of AT101 led to cytokine release syndrome and neurotoxicity of grade 3 or higher observed in one person each.

The total response rate was 91.7%, along with a significant 100% response rate in the DL-2 and DL-3 groups.

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CAR T-cell therapy (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy) is a treatment revolving around T-cells with chimeric antigen receptors that are reactive to specific cancer cells and infusing them into patients to eliminate cancer cells.

Current CAR T-cell therapies, including Kymriah, use an antibody binding site, extracted from mice, called FMC63. But the new treatment, labelled AT101, applies a humanised antibody binding site closely linked to cancer cells, compared to FMC63.

“Although this is a phase 1 study conducted with a small number of patients, considering that the response rates of existing treatments are around 40-50%, confirming the effectiveness and safety of AT101 is significant,” Professor Dok Hyun Yoon, a member of the Division of Oncology at Asan Medical Center, commented on the progress.

The results of the therapeutic study are found in the recently published international journal “Molecular Cancer”.