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ASCO conference: Gilead's CAR-T therapies show effectiveness in blood cancers

Gilead Sciences Inc. said the response to its chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy Yescarta may help predict longer-term disease control in patients with a certain type of blood cancer.

CAR-T cell therapies work by manipulating a patient's own disease-fighting T cells and then infusing them back into the body to fight blood cancers.

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Yescarta, which Gilead acquired after snapping up Kite Pharma Inc., is undergoing a study named Zuma-1 in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, or DLBCL. A new analysis of the study data was presented at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting.

DLBCL is an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that affects B-lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell.

The CAR-T cell therapy is already approved in the U.S. for adults with DLBCL, after two previous lines of treatment have failed.

Gilead said new analysis from the study indicates that response to the therapy at three months can predict whether the disease will worsen, also called progression-free survival, in the long-term. The study had shown that, at a median follow-up of 15.1 months, 83% of the patients saw a reduction in their disease with 58% showing no traces of the cancer, also called complete response.

Of the 42 patients with complete response and nine with partial response three months after the infusion, the 12-month progression-free survival rates were 79% and 78% of the patients, respectively.

Gilead also revealed new analysis from the phase 1 study named Zuma-3 testing its CAR-T cell therapy KTE-C19 among patients with relapsed or refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, a type of cancer in which the bone marrow makes too many lymphocytes.

The study showed that patients responded to KTE-C19 regardless of prior treatment with Amgen Inc.'s Blincyto, an FDA-approved treatment for ALL.

Following eight or more weeks of treatment, 63% patients with prior Blincyto treatment and 80% without prior treatment showed no signs of the disease. After evaluating all the patients, 94% reported no signs of cancer.

The 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting is expected to bring together more than 32,000 professionals from all over the world, with more than 2,500 study abstracts to be presented on-site and an additional 3,350 abstracts to be published online.