Outcome of Donor-Derived Tumor Associated Antigen-Specific T Cell Therapy in Patients with High-Risk or Relapsed Acute Leukemia Post Allogeneic BMT

Background: Patients with hematologic malignancies relapsing after allogeneic blood or marrow transplantation (BMT) have limited response to conventional salvage therapies with an expected 1-year overall survival (OS) of <20%. Current strategies to treat relapsed hematopoietic cancer after BMT, such as chemotherapy and donor lymphocyte infusions (DLI) to enhance the immunologic graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect, have low efficacy and are associated with graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). An alternative strategy to boost the GVL effect is to infuse donor-derived T-cells targeting tumor-associated antigen (TAA) peptides as circulating TAA-specific T-cells are associated with maintenance of remission post-BMT. In this phase-I study, we evaluated the safety and clinical outcomes following administration of a novel T-cell therapeutic targeting three TAAs, WT1, PRAME and survivin in patients with acute leukemia who relapsed or were at high-risk of relapse after allogeneic BMT.