Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have conducted a study, published in Nature Medicine, which shows that the development of any type of second cancer after CAR T cell therapy is a rare phenomenon. Of 449 patients treated with commercially available CAR T cell therapies at Penn Medicine between January 2018 and November 2023, only 16 were diagnosed with a second cancer after receiving CAR T cell therapy. Most of the secondary cancers (12 of 16) were solid tumors, including skin cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer. In one patient who developed a secondary lung tumor after CAR T cell therapy, an incidental T-cell lymphoma was also identified in a lymph node removed during surgery for the lung tumor. Molecular analyses showed that the T-cell lymphoma did not harbor the CAR transgene, meaning that it was not a CAR-positive lymphoma and that there was no clear link with CAR T cell therapy.
