NEW DELHI: Blood cancer patients treated with Nexcar19 – ‘Made in India’ CAR-T cancer therapy, available at a tenth of the cost of Western treatments – responded quickly, with their cancer shrinking significantly, a new study shows.
Nearly half the patients in both B-cell leukemia and lymphoma groups showed no worsening of their disease even a year later. Published in Nature’s Blood Cancer Journal, the study showed that NexCAR19—developed by ImmunoACT (a spin-off from IIT Bombay) with Tata Memorial Hospital—can in some cases deliver long-term cancer-free survival.
The findings from the first real-world multicentre study of Talicabtagene autoleucel or NexCAR19, India’s first commercially approved CAR-T cell therapy for advanced blood cancers, confirmed that it offers an effective treatment option for certain blood cancers, particularly when other treatments haven’t worked or when the cancer has returned.
Dr Atharv Karulkar, co-founder and head of scientific programmes, ImmunoACT, said, “Real-world outcomes from 250 patients show NexCAR19 has efficacy comparable to globally approved CAR-T therapies.”
The study, which evaluated 250 patients with difficult-to-treat B-cell cancers across 56 treatment centres, including in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, between November 2023 and January 31, 2025, found that 88% of relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia patients saw their cancer significantly shrink or clear within 28 days of receiving the treatment.