At the 65th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, Peihua Lu, MD, Beijing Lu Daopei Institute of Hematology, Langfang, China, highlights the promising efficacy and safety outcomes of naturally selected CD7 chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (NS7CAR-T) as a potential bridging therapy among patients with CD7-positive acute myeloid leukemia (AML). 

Dr Lu noted that although NS7CAR-T allowed patients to achieve a favorable initial complete response, more data and follow-up are needed to assess its value. 

Transcript: 

Thank you very much for the invitation. My name is Peggy Lu. I'm from China. I work for a hospital called Lu Daopei Hospital in Beijing, China. I'm very happy to attend 2023’s ASH meeting in San Diego, and [I’m] really honored to have an oral presentation this year. Our oral presentation mainly focuses [on] using the anti-CD7, CAR-T therapy for the treatment of relapse[d/refractory] CD7-positive acute myeloid leukemia. 

As we all know once AML becomes very refractory and relapsed, the outcome will be very poor. Even with the allogeneic stem cell transplantation, we really need new, inventive treatment for this group of patients. CAR-T has become more and more mature, especially in treating B-cell malignanc[ies]. 

However, [there is] not much yet there for treating AML. Now, everybody is working on that, and hopefully, we have a breakthrough to bring some new treatment[s] for this group of patients. We all know approximately 30% of AML patients express CD7, which might be a good target for CAR-T. In our group, we take this opportunity and we have anti-CD7 CAR-T therapy, specifically, for this CD7 target. 

We enrolled 10 patients. These 10 patients we enrolled [were] really heavily pretreated. The age[s] [ranged] from 2 to 63. The median leukemia cell in their bone marrow was 17%, and [in] 1 patient [was] even as high as 73%. In 70% of those patients, previously already ha[d] allogenic bone marrow transplantation and failed at the transplantation and then faced no other good option.

They joined this study and the median line of prior therapy for those patients was 8, and 1 patient even ha[d] up to 17. So, [this was a] really, heavily treated a group of patients. Once we give patients CAR-T therapy, each patient only requires 1 dose of infusion. Then, 4 weeks after the treatment, we reevaluate them. 

We [found] out this group of patients achieved 70% complete remission. This is very, very encouraging. [The] majority [of] patients even had a very deep remission, suddenly. We still need to work on the long-term outcome, however, which is step by step, and we are working on that. 

The other encouragement is the safety profile for this CAR-T is very manageable. For these 10 patients, we do not even see any neurotoxicity and no significant increased infection rate. In the future, to confirm the efficacy and safety, we really need to enroll more patients in this clinical trial and have a longer follow-up.

Source: 

Zhang X, Yang Z, Li J, et al. Naturally selected CD7-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy for refractory/relapsed acute myeloid leukemia: phase I clinical trial. Presented at the ASH 65th Annual Meeting & Exposition; December 9-12 2023; San Diego, California. Abstract 218