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 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.

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

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.

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