Side Effects of Novel Form of Immunotherapy

New form of immunotherapy — CAR-T cell therapy is reported for the first time to have a potentially serious side effect.

New form of immunotherapy — CAR-T cell therapy is reported for the first time to have a potentially serious side effect as per a case study at the Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine, published in Nature Medicine.

The team caution that recently approved CAR-T cell treatment for multiple myeloma may result in certain symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease.

Cancer Immunotherapy
Cancer immunotherapy is a new advancement in cancer treatment that uses certain components of a person's immune system to fight against cancer cells.

‘New form of immunotherapy — CAR-T cell therapy is reported for the first time to have a potentially serious side effect resembling Parkinson’s disease.’

Multiple myeloma is an incurable type of blood plasma cancer that is resistant to therapies. The CAR-T cell immunotherapy utilizes genetically engineered immune system cells — chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.

Specifically, in CAR-T cell therapy, a target protein called B cell maturation antigen (BCMA) is used for multiple myeloma treatment (especially resistant types) with impressive response rates.

BCMA-targeted CAR-T Cell Therapy

CAR T-Cell Therapy - Novel Form of Immunotherapy
CAR T-cell therapy is a type of gene therapy where the patient’s T-lymphocytes are genetically altered to target cancer cells within the patient’s body.

The case study showed that a patient in Mount Sinai started presenting with progressive neurological features resembling Parkinson’s disease — tremors along with handwriting and gait changes, after 3 months of BCMA-targeted CAR-T cell therapy course.

Following this, the patient succumbed to death from infectious complications. Later, it was found that there was evidence of BCMA protein and scarring in the brain’s basal ganglia.

Multiple Myeloma / Plasma Cell Myeloma–Symptoms-Treatment-Prognosis-Support Group
Multiple Myeloma caught public attention when model turned actress Lisa Ray, who worked in Deepa Mehta’s ‘Water’ , declared that she had the incurable Multiple Myeloma.

This suggests that the changes could be a serious side effect of the BCMA targeting therapy in the brain.

“Our findings will impact the risk-benefit assessment of BCMA-targeted CAR-T cell therapy for multiple myeloma and have already led to improved monitoring and proactive management of neurologic adverse events across clinical trials of BCMA-targeted therapy,” says Oliver Van Oekelen, MD, PhD student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the first author of the manuscript.

Source-Medindia

Side Effects of Novel Form of Immunotherapy — CAR-T Cell Therapy

New form of immunotherapy — CAR-T cell therapy is reported for the first time to have a potentially serious side effect.