Drs. John Sweetenham and Fred Locke discuss the FDA investigation on the risk of cancer from CAR T-cell therapy and share insights on the known number of cases and the potential implications on clinical research and patient care. TRANSCRIPT Dr. John Sweetenham: Hello, I’m Dr. John Sweetenham from the UT Southwestern Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and host of the ASCO Daily News Podcast. CAR T-cell therapies have been game changers for treating certain cancers including lymphomas and leukemias, as well as multiple myeloma, since the vast majority of patients who have received CAR-T do not have other curative options with conventional non-cellular, anti-cancer therapies. But on November 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it is investigating whether CAR T-cell therapy can, in rare cases, cause secondary cancers. The FDA launched the probe after receiving reports from clinical trials and other data sources of T-cell malignancies in patients who received CAR T-cell immunotherapies. Joining me to discuss the investigation and its implications for the field is Dr. Fred Locke, a medical oncologist and translational researcher and a senior member and chair in the Department of Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Locke is an internationally renowned clinical research leader in the field of CAR T-cell therapy. You'll find our disclosures in the transcript of this episode, and disclosures of all guests on podcasts are available at asco.org/DNpod. Fred, it’s great to have you on the podcast today. Dr. Fred Locke: Thanks, John, I’m really glad to be here. Dr. John Sweetenham: So, T-cells are the backbone of CAR T-cell therapies, and there are currently 6 CAR-T products approved by the FDA. As our listeners will know, CAR T-cell therapies manipulate a patient's T-cells, enabling them to recognize and attack antigens on cancer cells and induce potential long-standing changes in the immune system. In its statement on November 28, the FDA said it determined that the risk of T-cell malignancies is applicable to all of the currently approved BCMA- and CD19-directed, genetically modified, autologous CAR T-cell immunotherapies. Fred, could you comment for us on the investigation: How many patients are reported to have developed second malignancies from CAR T-cell therapy, and whether there are likely to be more secondary cancers reported? Dr. Fred Locke: Yes, so the FDA and the reports are coming out that there are 19 cases of T-cell malignancy that we're aware of that have occurred after the current FDA-approved CAR T-cell therapies were administered for the treatment of leukemia, lymphoma, or multiple myeloma. The majority of those cases were reported through the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System. And we don't know a lot of details of those 19 cases. We think that there's probably about 13,000 to 14,000 patients who've been treated with the commercial CAR T-cell therapies. So if you kind of do some crude math, you can come up with 19 out of say, 13,500; we're at about 0.1% of patients who could have developed T-cell lymphoma after treatment with these CAR T-cell therapies. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that T-cell lymphoma could develop from gene-modified T-cells, and these are all the patient's own T-cells that have been modified outside of the body. But I would still posit that this is a really low incidence of T-cell lymphomas in these patients who really are without other great treatment options. Dr. John Sweetenham: Yeah, and I think that's a point that we'll return to a little bit later on in the conversation around the fact that you know, clearly, there are major benefits that have been associated with CAR T-cell therapy and hematologic malignancies so far. And of course over the years, I think that many of us have become familiar with and learned a great deal about how to manage some of the more serious si