Brian Shaffer, MD, on Promising Signs of Efficacy in Post-CAR-T NHL NK Cell Therapy
The assistant attending physician and bone marrow transplant specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center discussed updated data on GDA-201 plus rituximab.
"A major advantage of NK cells over adoptive T cells is that the incidence of cytokine release and ICANS appear to be significantly lower with NK cell products in general. And the same is noted in the context of this trial with relatively low cytokine release and neurologic sequelae. So obviously, more data needs to be collected to make firm conclusions on these areas, but overall, it looks promising.”
GDA-201 (Gamida Cell) allogeneic natural killer cell therapy was well tolerated in combination with rituximab in doses up to 2x108 cells/kg in patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and demonstrated some evidence of clinical efficacy in the post-autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy setting.
Study participants experienced no treatment-related serious adverse events (AEs) and no cases of immune effector cell associated neurotoxicity syndrome. All patients experienced grade 3-4 neutropenia. One patient died of disease progression, 3 had complete response, 2 had partial response, and 2 had stable disease. Three of the responders had disease relapse after CAR T-cell therapy.
These data, from a phase 1/2 multicenter, open-label trial (NCT05296525) were presented by Brian Shaffer, MD, assistant attending physician and bone marrow transplant specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, at the 2024 Tandem Meetings |Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT and CIBMTR, held in San Antonio, Texas, February 21-24, 2024.
CGTLive spoke with Shaffer to learn more about the updated data he presented. He went over the findings and gave some background to the study. He also shared his excitement at the encouraging results and touched on the safety advantages that NK therapies have over CAR T-cell therapies.
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