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...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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