John Ligon, MD, on Fertility Outcomes in Patients Who Have Received CAR-T

“Especially now that cellular therapy is moving earlier in treatments, I think we do need to come together as a society and come up with some sort of standardized guidance that we can give patients and also prospectively try to collect data on patients who are receiving cellular therapy and their fertility outcomes. That way, we can come up with real evidence-based guidelines moving forward.”

Although chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy originally made its name in the landscape of care for hematological malignancies as a late-line treatment option for patients with relapsed or refractory disease, some CAR-T therapies are have since become FDA-approved options for earlier line treatment settings. In addition, clinical trials and other data collection are ongoing that may allow for these and other CAR-T therapy products to be used even in even earlier treatment settings in the future. As such, understanding the potential long-term and late effects of CAR-T is a task of greater and greater importance. One area of interest is the potential impact of CAR-T therapy on both male and female fertility, which has not been well-established.

John Ligon, MD, an assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine, has been conducting research on the topic of CAR-T and fertility and presented early findings at the 2024 Tandem Meetings |Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT and CIBMTR, held in San Antonio, Texas, February 21-24, 2024. CGTLive® sat down with Ligon for an interview at the conference to learn more. Ligon noted that across data collected from several CIBMTR centers, 7 pregnancies and 5 live births had been recorded from patients who had been treated with CAR-T. Ligon emphasized that this early data is encouraging, but treatment centers need to implement standardized guidelines to counsel patients on fertility and monitor outcomes in the context of CAR-T.

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REFERENCES
1. Ligon JA. CAR T-cells and fertility. Presented at: 2024 Tandem Meetings, February 21-24, San Antonio, Texas.