24 February 2023
Some forms of blood cancer can be treated with an innovative immunotherapy. Now Munich-based researchers may have found specific targets for the treatment of AML.
One of several forms of leukemia (cancer of the blood), AML is a deadly disease. Five years after the initial diagnosis, only one-third of patients are still alive. Up to 85 percent of patients appear to be cured after intensive chemotherapy. In more than half of such cases, however, the disease returns within one to two years because the chemotherapy has not destroyed all leukemia cells. In the event of a relapse, a stem cell transplant is the only hope for curing the patient. But even then, the long-term probability of survival is less than 20 percent. New treatment options are therefore urgently needed.
Unlike other forms of blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cannot currently be treated with CAR-T cell immunotherapy. This is due to the lack of specific molecular targets by which certain immune cells could specifically target AML cells. Two research teams led by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kobold together with Dr. Adrian Gottschlich from the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at LMU’s University of Munich Hospital and Dr. Carsten Marr together with Moritz Thomas from the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich have now succeeded in discovering such targets. Their results have been published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.