Engineered T Cells in Synovial Sarcoma: Persistence Pays Off!

Synovial sarcoma (SS) is an aggressive malignancy that typically affects adolescents and young adults and is associated with poor prognosis. Although SS has failed to respond to immune checkpoint blockade, other strategies designed to generate an immune response, including adoptive cell therapies targeting the cancer testis antigen NY-ESO-1, have shown encouraging results. In this issue, D'Angelo and colleagues confirm the safety and feasibility of adoptive T-cell therapy with autologous T cells engineered to express NY-ESO-1c259, an affinity-enhanced T-cell receptor recognizing an HLA-A2-restricted NY-ESO-1-derived peptide, and demonstrate encouraging antitumor responses in 50% of treated patients, particularly in the setting of persistence of polyfunctional NY-ESO-1c259-expressing T cells in circulation for at least 6 months. Cancer Discov; 8(8); 914-7. ©2018 AACR.See related article by D'Angelo et al., p. 944. ©2018 American Association for Cancer Research.