Staff writer Luca Read discusses the initially promising but increasingly nerve-wracking research into CAR T cells for cancer research at King’s.
Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells have been gaining popularity as a new form of immunotherapy for treating cancers.
They work by taking sample of T cells (the immune cell the body makes to destroy pathogens) from a patient and adding a CAR that is designed in a lab for a specific disease.
A CAR is added to the T cell through adding genes that code for the T cell making this receptor we want. We can tailor these to very specific parts of other cells allowing the T cells to attack just what is needed to be destroyed.
Gaining traction in 2017 with the approval of the blood cancer drug tisagenlecleucel by the FDA, there are now seven approved CAR T cell therapies available with the most recent approval in November 2024.
King’s have been progressing this further with a paper published in Nature in July 2026 looking at using CAR T cells for targeting the lethal brain tumours, glioblastoma.
Dr Sheila Singh was part of this work and led her team to help show that CAR T cells could be very useful for treating and stopping the return of malignant brain tumours called glioblastoma.
This work helped identify a target for the CAR T cells, GPNMB (Glycoprotein Non-metastatic Melanoma protein B) which is a protein that only glioblastomas and tumour-associated macrophages (TAMs) produce.
Macrophages are a type of immune cell that should help destroy cancer cells but can end up being corrupted (becoming TAMs) and helping the tumour by supressing other immune cells and promoting blood vessels supplying the tumour cell with nutrients.
The CAR T cells killed the tumour cells and reducing the number of TAMs that were positive for GPNMB. Through this they have identified a better target for solid tumours and furthered the use of CAR T cells as they have mostly been used to treat blood cancers.
The caveat: these are all preclinical findings but show great promise for future testing in patients with glioblastoma.
King’s had a central role in this work as part of the scientific leadership and conceptual contributions.
Recently however there has been some less positive developments. In August 2026 Novartis’ autoimmune CAR T-cell programme was paused after three deaths in studies from severe system wide inflammatory reactions leading to eight different studies being put on hold.
Additionally around the same time Bristol Myers paused autoimmune trials after one death (only disclosed this October) and says the death was unrelated to observed “transient and reversible inflammatory events” that caused the trial pause.
Very recently on 27th October another immunotherapy drug has had development discontinued by company Artiva (this was a different type of therapy called natural killer cell therapy).
Although we are seeing great developments and potential in this new form of treatment there are growing concerns in the safety of autoimmune cell therapy as these patterns emerge.
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