Opinion

May 15, 2025, 05:02

Nicola Ferrari: A new toxicity syndrome in patients with autoimmune disease treated with CAR T-cell therapy

Nicola Ferrari, Director, Translational Science Lead at AstraZeneca, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“A new toxicity syndrome in patients with autoimmune disease treated with CAR T-cell therapy

CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has been recently introduced to treat severe forms of SLE, idiopathic inflammatory myopathy, and systemic sclerosis. However, little is known about autoimmune disease-specific side-effects of this new treatment approach.
The authors report on a new side-effect of CAR T-cell therapy in patients with autoimmune disease, which they term local immune effector cell-associated toxicity syndrome (LICATS).
LICATS is a local and self-limited impairment of organ function that occurs after CAR T-cell treatment, most likely based on the cleansing of immune cells from the affected organs.
It exclusively occurred during the B-cell aplasia phase and only involved organs previously affected by the respective autoimmune disease.
Further studies will need to be undertaken in the future to better characterise the mechanisms driving LICATS.”

Title: Local immune effector cell-associated toxicity syndrome in CAR T-cell treated patients with autoimmune disease: an observational study

Authosr: Melanie Hagen, Fabian Müller, Andreas Wirsching, Soraya Kharboutli, Silvia Spoerl, Christina Düsing, Tobias Krickau, Markus Metzler, Simon Völkl, Michael Aigner, Sascha Kretschmann, Ingrid Vasova, Marc Saake, Stefan Schliep, Torsten Kubacki, Nicolas Hunzelmann, Laura Bucci, Jule Taubmann, Christina Bergmann, Andrea-Hermina Györfi, Georg Schett

Read the Full Article in The Lancet Rheumatology.

Nicola Ferrari

Andrea-Hermina Györfi Andreas Wirsching cancer CAR T-cell therapy Christina Bergmann Christina Düsing Fabian Müller Georg Schett Ingrid Vasova Jule Taubmann Laura Bucci Marc Saake Markus Metzler Melanie Hagen Michael Aigner Nicolas Hunzelmann OncoDaily Oncology Sascha Kretschmann Silvia Spoerl Simon Völkl Soraya Kharboutli Stefan Schliep Tobias Krickau Torsten Kubacki

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