
Over a decade ago, two leukemia cancer patients received an experimental cancer treatment, the long term success of which was not known, using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR T) cells. Ten years later, the patients are still in remission and the CAR T cells were still detectable. While the study only has the success of two patients and more research needs to be done, the findings are important because this may mean the treatment is not only successful in causing cancer remission but also has long term success of over a decade. As the article in Nature explains, “Our identification and characterization of these unexpected CAR T cell populations provide novel insight into the CAR T cell characteristics associated with anti-cancer response and long-term remission in leukemia.”