What Is CAR-T Cell Therapy’s Role in Pediatric Solid Tumors?

CAR-T cell therapy has cured some children with blood cancers when chemotherapy could not, said Dr. Tanja Gruber of Stanford. By engineering a patient’s immune cells to target cancer, it offers a new approach distinct from chemotherapy.

Gruber explained that while early responses in solid tumors such as brain cancers are encouraging, they haven’t yet matched the rapid success seen in blood cancers, which circulate throughout the body and differ from tumors in specific locations.

Gruber is a physician-scientist specializing in pediatric blood cancers, with expertise in infants with leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia. She trained at USC and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, served 11 years on the faculty at St. Jude, and is now chief of pediatric hematology, oncology, stem cell transplant and regenerative medicine at Stanford.

Transcript

Can you talk about how CAR T, which began in blood cancers and is now moving into solid tumors, may impact pediatric patients and their families?

I'll start with saying how much it impacted children with blood cancers, and then go from there and how we see that transition or translation into the solid tumor world.

But in terms of blood cancers, what was really amazing is that CAR-T therapy was able to put patients in remission who were very resistant to chemotherapy, and so we were able to cure children that chemotherapy couldn’t cure. That was really a huge advance in our field.

The other thing we learned is that some of the things that may make a patient resistant to chemotherapy don’t necessarily make you resistant to CAR-T. That’s because it’s a very different way of killing the cancer cells. It’s really engineering a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and kill the cancer, which is very different from how chemotherapy works, which targets rapidly dividing cells.

We would then anticipate, of course, that if we have CAR-T cells for brain tumors or solid tumors, we would see a similar response. I would say we’ve seen some very encouraging responses, but it wasn’t the immediate home run that we saw for blood cancers. That’s because when you have brain tumors and solid tumors, it’s very different from a blood cancer, which is circulating all over your body and is a cancer of immune cells.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.