The treatment of blood cancers has dramatically improved in the last five years, thanks to a new class of cancer immunotherapies called CAR-T cell therapy. This therapy — which involves engineering a patient’s own T cells in the lab to kill cancer cells and then infusing them back into the patient — cures about 40 percent of people with otherwise incurable lymphoma. But others relapse or don’t respond to the treatment at all.
To learn about the molecular mechanisms underlying such different responses, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Massachusetts General Hospital, studied blood samples of patients who received CAR-T therapy. They found molecular markers that indicate how a patient responded to the treatment, and also identified specific types of immune cells that likely contribute to relapse.
