Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish - In a medical first, the children were treated with genetically engineered T-cells from another person.

If you liked that then you'll love this; A lot of people seem skeptical in this thread. And you should be, but much of the skepticism is for the wrong reasons.

The kids also received chemo, so we don't know if the T-cells actually were responsible for driving the complete response.

I keep seeing people say this, but I don't think that they read the article or fully understand the nature of the patients' disease and treatment history.

The patients were patients whose leukemia had relapsed and was refractory to traditional chemotherapy.

For this current treatment, the patients did receive chemo - but it was lymphodepleting. The strategy here isn't to use the chemo to eliminate all the tumor cells (that likely wouldn't work, since the tumors have evolved to be resistant to chemo). Instead it is aiming to clear a little bit of space in the body for the donor T-cells to colonize and expand in. Further, the chemo creates an inflammatory milieu which helps the donor T-cells.

The patients also received sero-depleting CD52 antibodies. This is a targeted therapy, not a chemotherapy. It is depleting healthy immune cells within the patients' bodies (again helping to make space) and maybe also depleting tumor cells as well (it would depend on if the patients' tumors were positive for CD52 - not all B-ALL cases are; in fact I think most are not since it is really a marker of more mature B-lineages).

Cancer cured on Reddit. Again. Sigh...

This is real, transformative medicine. I wrote a discussion series post on CAR-T cells for r/science that may be interesting if you would like to learn more about this technology.

So what should you be skeptical about?

this treatment wasn't by itself designed to be curative. Rather, it was intended to bridge the patients to another treatment that would be curative - a stem cell transplant.

while the response rate (2/2) is impressive, this is obviously a very small set of patients. The important number to look out for will be duration of remission. Were these patients cured? Or will the disease relapse in a few months? We don't know yet, but previous studies suggest that the risk of relapse is still very real.

to what extent is the allogenic origin of the T-cells a problem? Will we see graft versus host disease? Host versus graft?

what are the consequences of depleting the host adaptive immune system? Is it worth depleting the host immune system to enable off the shelf allogenic T-cell therapies? This is particularly important since on of the major findings in cancer research in the past decade has been that the immune system is one of the most potent tools we have for fighting cancer.

/r/Futurology Thread Parent Link - technologyreview.com