• Investigating adverse effects and advantages of chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy for cancer patients : A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
  • Minoo Momenzadeh,1 Mohammad Amin Talebpour,2,* Zahra Yaghubi,3
    1. School of Medicine, Mashhad Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran
    2. School of Medicine, Mashhad Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran
    3. School of Medicine, Mashhad Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran


  • Introduction: Cancer remains a devastating disease as existing therapies are too often ineffective and toxicities remain unacceptably high. Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells are engineered T cells which have been developed in recent years as a breakthrough in cancer therapy. CAR T cells are effective against both solid tumors and hematological cancers.It is important to evaluate the risk factors before starting this new anti-cancer therapy because physicians do not yet have sufficient clinical experience. Therefore the aim of this study is to investigate the adverse effects and advantages of chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy for cancer patients.
  • Methods: This review was performed within articles published at PubMed, Google scholar and Embase from 2015 to 2021. The keywords were Cancer, Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell,Treatment and Adverse effects. By searching this database,99 articles were found, 24 of them were not related with investigating and 52 of them by reading abstract were removed. All articles chosen from English articles.
  • Results: Finally 23 articles were included in the study. Some studies have discussed the benefits of CAR T-cell therapy and said that these therapies have improved the quality of life and survival of cancer patients. Some researches have shown that the success of this method in treating solid tumors has been limited. And there are also a number of adverse events, cardiotoxicity is one of the most harmful effects of anticancer therapeutics. The incidence of CAR T cell-associated cardiotoxicities was shown to be as high as 26% and thought to be primarily mediated by cytokine release syndrome. There are no standardized guidelines for the treatment of cytokine release syndrome or associated cardiotoxicity. After that, neurotoxicity is the most common noncardiac adverse event. Available evidence suggests that pretreatment evaluation, close monitoring, and early intervention may reduce these effects.
  • Conclusion: although multiple adverse events associated with CAR-Ts have been observed in small studies, but no large-scale studies exist. As a result, more large-scale research on the pathophysiology of disorders as well as new approaches to overcome the challenges associated with this treatment is suggested.
  • Keywords: Cancer, Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell,Treatment,Adverse effects