Dr. Ghosh on the Future of CAR T-Cell Therapy in Patients With Hematologic Malignancies

Nilanjan Ghosh, MD, PhD, physician, Levine Cancer Institute, discusses the future of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy in the treatment of patients with hematologic malignancies.

There are many unanswered questions with regard to CAR T-cell therapy in hematologic malignancies, such as whether CAR T cells can be extended to other B-cell CD19-positive malignancies like mantle cell lymphoma or chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It would be very encouraging to see CAR T cells play a role in long-term remission, says Ghosh. Physicians do not have long-term data yet, but finding that patients who are refractory to all chemotherapy regimens had remission for at least 1 year would mark tremendous progress in the field.

Ghosh says that the relationship between CAR T-cell therapy and transplant might change if CAR T-cell therapy is moved to an earlier line of treatment, even for chemo-sensitive disease. Physicians do not yet know if CAR T-cell therapy is superior to transplant and whether transplant is necessary for all eligible patients with large cell lymphoma. These are all questions that clinical trials are being designed to answer, states Ghosh.