Dailymail.co.uk reports: Experts say the breakthrough treatment has saved the lives of thousands of patients since it was approved in 2017.
But the way it is delivered may disrupt cell DNA and lead to other cancers, which is a small risk with all so-called gene therapies.
The FDA says the tiny number of cases – which have not been proven to have been caused by CAR-T – against the number of lives the treatment has saved means the benefit still massively outweighs the risk.
It is not unheard of for cancer treatments to, paradoxically, carry a small risk of starting new cancers, with radiation and chemotherapy both known to do so.
CAR-T therapies, or chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies, was first approved in November 2017 and is reserved for cancer patients who would otherwise die without it.
The FDA confirmed it was launching an urgent investigation into reports of 19 cases of new cancer linked to CAR-T therapies, which are given to terminal blood cancer patients.
The treatment takes immune cells from the body which are then reengineered to attack tumors before being infused back into the patient’s blood.
CARs are proteins engineered to give T cells the new ability to target a specific toxin. In the case of CAR-T therapies, scientists insert the gene for CARs into T cells from a patient, which then allows the T-cells to attach to cancer cells and kill them.
The National Cancer Institute estimates there will be roughly 60,000 new cases of leukemia in 2023, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths.
A third of patients with the blood cancer die within five years of a diagnosis.
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society estimate 90,000 people will be diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that includes Hodgkin (HL) and Non-Hodgkin (NHL) Lymphoma, and 21,000 are estimated to die from the disease. The five-year survival rate for HL is 96 percent and 85 percent for NHL.
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