Topic
Cell therapy that engineers a patient's T cells with a chimeric antigen receptor; approved for blood cancers, studied in solid tumors and autoimmune disease.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory researchers activated PPARD in immune cells and saw colorectal tumor growth slow or stop in lab models. The Nature Immunology paper uses CAR T cells, a format already used to treat certain cancers.
Reality
Researchers at Portugal's iBET argue that capping CAR T cell expansion at three days or less would yield fitter cells at lower doses. Marta Costa's group says the approach also needs faster release assays, since several now take a week or more.
Reality
Chinese groups are developing 82% of the 140 in vivo CAR-T drugs in animal or human testing, a Boston Consulting Group analysis found. Developers elsewhere can expect the field's first clinical evidence, and much of its competition, to come from Chinese trials.
Reality
The Berlin phase 1 trial was built to measure cytokine release syndrome rather than remission, and its six-patient denominator carries no comparator, so the ten-patient second phase against an approved B-cell drug is the one that settles anything.
Reality
A 3-year-old whose liver cancer outlasted surgery and three lines of chemotherapy has been in complete remission for a year after CAR T cells given entirely in the outpatient setting, Baylor doctors report.
Reality
Ninety percent of drug candidates that reach human trials are never approved. A Norwegian group argues some of that triage belongs in donor blood, where nanoparticles meet the plasma proteins and immune cells that settle their fate.
Reality