ASCO's Cancer Advance of the Year: CAR-T

It seems like I've been writing a lot lately about CAR-T. But I guess that's because it's been in the news so much lately -- lots of lymphoma experts are very excited about it. And with good reason. The results from trials so far have been pretty amazing.

(In my last post, I mentioned the CAR-T and Follicular Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Blog. One of its contributers, William, added a comment to that post about his and his wife's experience -- you might want to check it out.)

Last week, ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, released its top cancer advances for the last year, and CAR-T came in at #1. That's a great endorsement for the treatment (not that it needed another one for everyone to realize how great its potential is).

For now, CAR-T's approved use in lymphoma is only for aggressive B cell lymphomas, including transformed Follicular Lymphoma. There are trials that look at its use in indolent B cell lymphomas, like the slow-growing versions of FL that many of us have.

CAR-T involves removing a patient's T cells and changing them, so the treatment is about as personalized as you can get. However, there are attempts at designing a CAR-T treatment that is "off the shelf" -- one that anyone can use, with the potentially complicated and expensive personalization process. If an effective version of that can be developed, then we'll really have something.

The ASCO report listed a bunch of other cancer advances form the last year, too. Not all of them deal with blood cancers, but a few of them should mean something to those of us with FL:

• Researchers and oncologists are (maybe slowly) paying more attention to Quality of Life issues. As treatments become more targeted, side effects should be less severe, and so Qulaity of Life should be better.
• Last year, the FDA approved the first "tissue-agnostic" cancer treatment, Pembrolizumab, also known as Keytruda. "Tissue-agnostic" means that it was not approved for a cancer of a specific body part (blood or stomach or breast). Instead, it targets a biomarker that shows up on cancers from a bunch of different places in the body -- skin, blood, brain, lung, head and neck. It's not yet approved for FL (though results from a phase 2 trial with Rituxan look pretty good). More importantly, it's a huge shift away from the way researchers have always thought about cancer. We don't just focus on a body part, but instead on the genetics underneath it all.
• The report also talks about cancer prevention -- stop smoking, and don't drink so much alcohol. Too late for us to prevent getting FL, but there is evidence that we can increase our survival with other lifestyle changes, including getting more exercise. 

I always enjoy reading about how excited cancer experts can get about the research they are doing. That's the vibe I get from the ASCO report -- lots of good things happened in the last year, and there's lots more to come.

Lots of reasons for hope.