Málaga, (EFE).- Mathematics can help to predict whether a patient will have an adequate response to cancer treatment, and for this reason the Spanish Group for Hematopoietic Transplantation and Cell Therapy (GETH-TC) has decided to integrate them into its research on the “revolutionary” CAR-T therapy.
Currently, there are 26 hospital centers that make up the National Network of Advanced Therapies of the national health system where this CAR-T immunotherapy can be administered against hematological cancer, three of them in Andalusia: the Virgen del Rocío in Seville, Reina Sofía de Córdoba and Regional of Málaga.
This therapy, which is currently used in patients who have relapsed after conventional treatments, has made it possible to improve the survival of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia or diffuse large cell lymphoma.
However, there are still 40 percent of leukemia patients who relapse even after receiving CAR-T therapy and about 55-60 percent of those with lymphoma, so researchers are trying to find biomarkers, “clues that they identify what is going to happen” when they receive this treatment.
Single base in all of Spain
A pioneering project tries to integrate the field of mathematics into this clinical research, since it allows “modeling clinical responses or biological behaviors”, explained this Thursday the coordinator of the Advanced Therapies Group of the GETH-TC of the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy, Antonio Pérez Martínez.
The group works to have a single database throughout Spain of patients who receive this treatment. They currently have 650, and the goal is to incorporate their clinical data, whether they respond to therapy or how CAR-T behaves once infused.
One of the challenges is to add the information provided by the PET-CT, a tomography that incorporates metabolic activity, in a common platform, along with other variables to be able to make “predictive models” and determine “with a high probability what will happen to the patient.
“As we feed more data, the model will end up being more accurate”, pointed out Pérez Martínez, who pointed out that it is a “complex” job because it requires segmenting the information and integrating it into a platform, but they are based on previous experiences in centers isolated.
Establishing these mathematical models can also help to develop “directed trials”, with a greater capacity to answer a question, he has indicated.
What is CAR-T therapy?
CAR-T cell therapy is a type of immunotherapy. To do this, doctors take the lymphocytes, the patient’s own defense cells, from their peripheral blood, and manipulate them in the laboratory to insert genetic information so that they are capable of selectively recognizing tumor cells.
“We educate them so that they learn to recognize (tumor cells) and they are reinfused into the patient, so that he attacks and destroys them,” explained the vice president of the GETH-TC and head of Hematology at the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville. Jose Antonio Perez Simon.
One of the advantages of this therapy is that it is a day of treatment, although the patient is hospitalized for ten days to monitor possible complications that may occur, but from then on he goes to check-ups and would not receive further treatment except in case of relapse. .
a hopeful future
The chances that a patient with acute lymphoblastic leukemia will remain in remission with this therapy is 60 percent at three years, while in lymphomas it is around 45 percent at three or four years of follow-up, compared to 5 -10 percent, in both cases, that they had with conventional therapies.
Pérez Simón has assured in a press conference that the future is “tremendously hopeful” because new hospitals have recently been designated to administer CAR-T therapy (14), with which there are already 26 centers available for it, which will allow reach more patients in whom other previous treatments fail.
Currently, the application of this therapy in other areas is being discussed, primarily hematology, such as multiple myeloma, although the hematologist believes that in the future the “leap” will be made to other solid tumors with this “disruptive” technology. EFE