CAR-T Deaths Cannot Be Good
By Derek Lowe,
Science AAAS
| 07. 08. 2016
Late yesterday afternoon, Matthew Herper broke the news that Juno Therapeutics had had their CAR-T leukemia trial put on hold after three patient deaths. That’s bad news no matter how you look at it, even for their competitors.
It’s too early to say for sure if Juno will be slowed in its path to market. In an interview, Bishop and Juno chief financial officer Steven Harr said that they think they understand why the deaths occurred, that they think they can get the trial back on track quickly, and that they do not think this will affect the development of the other 8 CART programs the company is pursuing.
Bishop says that the culprit appears to be a new drug, the chemotherapy fludarabine, that Juno recently added to the trial, called ROCKET. In the CART treatment, patients are first given a chemo cocktail that kills their existing T-cells. This gives the new T-cell, genetically re-engineered to attack cancer, room to grow. Juno has previously presented work showing that adding a drug called fludarabine to the chemotherapy makes the CART...
Related Articles
A Review of Exposed by Becky McClain
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
— John Lewis
Becky McClain became famous when she successfully sued Pfizer, one of the very largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies. She...
By Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, and Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal | 12.13.2025
Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right.
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 12.10.2025
Micah Nerio had known since his early 30s that he wanted to be a father, even if he did not have a partner. He spent a decade saving up to pursue surrogacy, an expensive process where he would create embryos...
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 12.08.2025
A huge defense policy bill, revealed by US lawmakers on Sunday, does not include a provision that would have provided broad healthcare coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF) for active-duty members of the military, despite Donald Trump’s pledge...
