Cell warfare

A NZ trial using immunotherapy to beat a form of blood cancer is expanding after promising results – and it's hoped the 'gold standard' treatment will soon be widely available.

- SARAH CATHERALL

It took just one minute for Peter Jefferies to be infused with a CAR T-cell treatment that saved his life. On August 22, 2022, the now 60-year-old lay in a bed at Wellington Hospital and was given a single shot of his own genetically modified immune cells to fight his deadly lymphoma B.

It was liquid gold for the West Coast police officer, who had endured five rounds of aggressive chemotherapy and was facing palliative care. Without CAR T-cell treatment, his haematologist told him he would die.

Jefferies is one of 16 patients out of 30 who were successfully treated in the first stage of the CAR T-cell therapy trial being run by the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington. Others who have publicly shared their stories include Auckland poet Michele Leggott (Listener, April 15, 2023) and Kirsty Horgan of Christchurch.

All those in the clinical trial have been diagnosed terminally ill and have exhausted conventional options to fight non-Hodgkin lymphoma B - a type of blood cancer. Stage II of the trial is now under way, with 60 patients being recruited, and results are expected by mid-2026.

CART (chimeric antigen receptor T cell) immunotherapy is a highly specialised treatment in which a patient's own immune system cells are extracted and modified in the laboratory to recognise and attack cancer cells when injected back into the body.

Points of difference for the WZTL-002 drug Malaghan is trialling include that it is a one-shot dose and has a better safety profile, with fewer side effects, than Car T-cell therapies available overseas.

In an exciting development for lymphoma B patients here, the trial is this month extending to hospitals in Christchurch and Auckland, making the treatment more accessible to qualifying patients around the country.