Researchers label early CAR-T therapy patient ‘cured’ after living a decade without cancer

In 2010, Doug Olsen became the second person in the world to receive CAR-T cell therapy, an experimental tactic to engineer his own immune cells to fight cancer. His doctors had tempered expectations for how well it would fight off Olsen’s chronic lymphocytic leukemia, an incurable blood cancer — it was a last stab in the dark, one with no guarantees.
“It was, at the time, an idea way out there,” Carl June, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the senior researcher on the experiment, said in a call Tuesday with reporters. “In the informed consent document that Doug signed, we thought [the CAR-T cells] would be gone in a month or two.” Read the rest…