Zinaida Good, PhD, on Exploring CAR-T Expansion Through Lineage Tracing

“It's a really exciting time to be working in the field of CAR T-cell therapies. This therapy shows tremendous potential—not only for hematological malignancies, but also for solid tumors—and deep correlative studies in patients are great to identify insights that could then be modeled in the right mouse model, to be translated back to the patient setting. Lineage tracing is a great tool for this, and I hope this will open multiple opportunities in future CAR T-cell therapy research.”

More than 80% of patients achieve a complete response (CR) with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) treatments for large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL); however, currently only about 40% of patients treated with CAR-T therapies for LBCL have CRs that remain durable for 6 months or more. As such, significant unmet needs remain for these patients. Although some companies and organizations are attempting to develop entirely new treatments, other researchers are investigating the possibility of improving outcomes with existing treatments by learning more about factors that affect treatment durability.

Zinaida Good, PhD, an instructor at Stanford Institutes of Medicine, is one such researcher. She presented a study entitled, “Lineage tracing of CAR T cells in patients with B cell malignancies,” at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2023, held April 14-19, 2023, in Orlando, Florida. The research was intended to gather information that could potentially be useful for improving durable responses in LBCL and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

In an interview with CGTLive™, Good discussed the motivation behind the study and the key results. In particular, she highlighted the finding that CAR-positive T-regulatory cells in CAR-T infusion products that are associated with disease progression likely derive from preexisting thymic derived T-regulatory cells. She noted that this indicates that removing T-regulatory cells before CAR-T manufacturing could potentially be a method to improve efficacy of the finished product.

Click here to read more coverage of the AACR 2023 Annual Meeting.

REFERENCE
Good Z. Lineage tracing of CAR T cells in patients with B cell malignancies. Presented at: AACR Annual Meeting. April 14-19, 2023; Orlando, FL. Abstract 1128.