CAR T-Cell Therapy for Blood Cancer Rarely Linked to Other Cancers: Stanford Medicine Study

The FDA put a black-box warning on the treatment after receiving 11 reports of T-cell lymphomas in patients receiving it, but new research says the risk is low.

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Patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy to treat blood cancer have a low risk of developing additional blood cancers from such treatments, according to a Stanford Medicine study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

CAR-T therapy is a type of cancer therapy for blood cancers that do not respond well to standard treatments. T immune cells are extracted from patients, genetically modified to make them better cancer fighters, and then returned to the patient’s body.