Reacción a "Reactions to trial using CAR-T cells prepared from donors to treat multiple myeloma"

It is a high-quality study. It is the first study using allogeneic anti-BCMA CAR-T cells (donor-derived and named ALLO-715) modified to express a second-generation CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] and edited with TALEN technology to inactivate the T cell-specific receptor alpha chain (TRAC) and CD52 genes, to reduce the risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and allow cell expansion and persistence of ALLO-715 in lymphodepleted patients with an anti-CD52 monoclonal antibody.  

The key advantage of this type of allogeneic product is immediacy, as the time between patient recruitment, lymphodepletion and CAR-T cell infusion is only a few days, whereas in autologous CAR-T therapies [using the patient's own cells] the average time between apheresis and product availability is more than 30 days, which is too long for many refractory patients with no other therapeutic options.  

Obviously this is a first study and it will be necessary to optimise multiple parameters such as dose, administration schedule, etc., but the results demonstrate the feasibility, safety and efficacy of this allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy in patients with multiple myeloma. Importantly, no cases of GVHD were documented and of the ten deaths that occurred during the course of the clinical trial, seven were related to tumour progression and three were due to severe infections (fungal pneumonia, adenoviral hepatitis and sepsis), which is related to the lymphodepletion strategy employed in this clinical trial.