The patient was 4 years old in 2006 when she arrived at Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital to receive therapy for nerve-cell cancer that had spread to her bones. She received a first-generation edition of the treatment.
“This provides me with a lot of hope,” Sneha Ramakrishna, MD, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher at Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine, told Nature. “We’re going to unlock CAR-T cells for people with solid tumors.”
Since 2017, seven CAR-T cell therapies have been approved by the FDA and have shown what the journal called “stunning” results in some blood cancers. Some patients have remained cancer-free for more than a decade following treatment. However, researchers have been unable to repeat success against solid tumors such as neuroblastoma, a nerve-cell cancer.
But with one success story and new iterations of the therapy, researchers are hopeful to change that trend, according to the report.
