Carl June: ‘We can now con­clude that CAR-T cells can ac­tu­al­ly cure pa­tients’

A decade af­ter the first-ever pa­tients were in­fused with CAR-T, at least two of them re­main can­cer free and their ge­net­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied cells still ap­pear ac­tive, sur­veilling their blood for any bud­ding ma­lig­nan­cies that dare crop up.

“We can now con­clude that CAR-T cells can ac­tu­al­ly cure pa­tients, based on these re­sults,” Carl June, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia im­mu­nol­o­gist who de­signed the first treat­ment, told re­porters Wednes­day, adding the re­sults came as a sur­prise. “We did not think that this would be a cu­ra­tive ther­a­py at all in 2010.”

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