Juno Therapeutics Inc on Wednesday said it decided to shut down development of an experimental leukemia treatment from a highly promising new class of immunotherapy following an investigation into toxicity that led to a handful of patient deaths.
The drug, JCAR015, uses a technology known as CAR-T being pursued by other companies as well. CAR-T therapy removes a key component of the immune system called T cells from a patient’s blood and re-engineers them to more efficiently attack cancer before returning them to the patient.
