Carlos A. Ramos, MD, on Alternatives to T-Cell Therapy

“One concern is that the biological properties of the product in the end may not be optimal, because [the patients have] had a lot of T-cell toxic chemotherapy. So, we hope that this will be a platform that we can use, we've treated a few patients, we've seen some complete responses. We still have the issue of durability of responses, so these are shorter than what we see, for instance, with CD19 CART-cells in general. But a lot of those patients have already received cell therapy with those cells before so maybe not a fair comparison, but this just means that we need to optimize the system and further develop it.”

While current cell therapy technologies are largely dominated by chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies or other forms of T-cell therapies, these therapies can hold their fair share of challenges in patients with cancer. Researchers, such as Carlos A. Ramos, MD, professor of medicine, Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, are looking into alternatives to T-cell therapy and the types of T-cells used in T-cell therapy.

Ramos gave a talk about the research he is involved in with at Baylor College of Medicine duringthe 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, held December 9-12, in San Diego, California. This research includes looking into natural killer (NK) T-cells which have NK markers apart from having a T-cell receptor, and then also using cells other than the conventional αβ T-cells. He also stressed the importance of improving allogeneic cell technologies as the off-the-shelf therapies can potentially offer many advantages over autologous therapies.

REFERENCE

Ramos CA. Off-the-shelf αβ- or NK-T Cells for Cancer Therapy. Presented at: 2023 ASH Annual Meeting. December 9-12; San Diego, California.