Currently, half of patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia—two types of cancer that affect blood cells—do not respond adequately to treatment with CAR-T cells. The therapy involves harvesting the patient’s own defense cells (T lymphocytes), modifying them in the laboratory to make them capable of destroying tumor cells, and reinjecting them into the body. These refractory cases usually relapse after conventional immunotherapy.

To overcome this problem, Brazilian researchers have developed a more powerful version of CAR-T cells. The details of the research were published in the journal Cancer Research.

CAR-T cell immunotherapy is revolutionary and has saved many people’s lives in recent years. However, there are still a significant proportion of patients who don’t respond to this treatment.