Doctors are being warned that a lifesaving cancer therapy may cause new tumors to form in rare cases.
In a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers urged physicians to ‘be on the lookout’ for unusual symptoms in patients who receive CAR-T therapy.
Twenty-five people in the US out of around 30,000 have been diagnosed with secondary cancer after receiving the treatment for a separate cancer.
CAR-T – which was approved in 2017 – takes immune cells from the body and engineers them to attack tumors before being infused back into the blood.
But the way it is delivered may disrupt cell DNA and lead to other cancers, which is a small risk with all so-called gene therapies.
This, the study authors emphasize, is a very rare scenario. According to their reports, than 1 percent of people who’ve gotten the CAR-T therapy have developed a secondary cancer from it.
But another new study from oncologists at Stanford that was published in the same journal found that as many as 6.5 percent of patients developed a secondary cancer in the three years after getting CAR-T therapy.
Even with these risks, CAR-T therapy saved the lives of far more people than it’s endangered, the authors in both new papers wrote.
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