Long-lived immune cells show promise against cancer in world-first trial

Nature's news service reports the first-in-human trial of a cell therapy based on stem cell memory T cells (Tscm) — lymphocytes capable of long-term self-renewal, from which a more durable antitumour response is expected than from conventional effector T cells. Some of the treated patients with blood cancers went into remission. This is a news item rather than a primary report: the number of patients treated, the response rate, the length of follow-up and the safety profile are not given, so no conclusion about the method's effectiveness can be drawn from it. That will require the full trial data and studies in larger numbers of patients.