By Prof. Anna Sureda, Barcelona, Spain (CIC 759)
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has been a revolutionary treatment strategy for patients with haematological malignancies. CAR T-cells represent the first example of a living drug.
“The first patient that we treated at our institution was a 42-year-old gentleman with primary refractory diffuse large B cell lymphoma that had already received three lines of therapy without any success. He had massive disease burden on day 0. He achieved a metabolic complete remission one month after the infusion of a CD19 CAR T-cell construct: impressive results with only one single shot. And more were to come. This is only the beginning … CAR T-cells will be probably moved to earlier lines of therapy and to a wide range of different disease: more patients will take the advantage of receiving this new treatment modality”.
The advent of CAR T-cell therapy has represented a learning curve for all our cellular therapy teams because of the specific side effects associated with its administration. In spite of its powerful effectiveness, the evidence on the long-term safety and efficacy of these treatments is limited. This is one of the very powerful reasons why consecutive data of patients being treated with CAR T-cells reporting to the EBMT Registry is of capital importance. There is a huge need to generate high-quality real-world data of our patients treated with CAR T-cells so all parties can better understand the efficacy, safety and improve the results of such therapies. Data reporting is quality.
“As an active EBMT centre, our real-time and close collaboration with the EBMT Registry by consecutively reporting data from our CAR T-cell treated patients is of capital importance and will contribute to the generation of real-world data that, without any doubt, will improve the outcome of our patients and move the field forward. We need to make it a successful story”.