Treatment of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy with Third-Party Allogeneic BK Virus T Cells.
Infusions of specially trained immune cells achieved lasting remission in over half of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy patients, a previously untreatable brain infection.
A single-center phase 2 study at MD Anderson evaluated third-party, HLA-partially-matched BK virus-specific T cells in 37 PML patients (NCT02479698), with 56.8% achieving overall response including 43.2% complete response at median 23 days. The 1-year overall survival was 61.1%, with responders after first infusion reaching 93.3% 1-year OS versus 0% in non-responders, establishing a scalable cellular immunotherapy approach for this otherwise fatal condition.
What the study was
- Study design
- phase_2_study
- Category
- cellular immunotherapy
- Maturity
- Potentially Practice-Changing
- Journal
- Clinical Infectious Diseases
Why it surfaced
Phase 2 study for PML, a universally fatal JCV demyelinating disease with no approved therapy. Off-the-shelf allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy paradigm from MD Anderson (Rezvani group) with robust response and survival data. 23 of 37 patients had hematologic malignancy as underlying diagnosis.
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