Epstein Barr Virus clinical trials at University of California Health

This study is a multi-center, randomized, open label, Phase III clinical trial for advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma(NPC) Patients. Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as gemcitabine and carboplatin, work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. Giving an infusion of a person's cytotoxic T cells (CTL) that have been treated in the laboratory may help the body build an effective immune response to kill tumor cells. Giving combination chemotherapy together with laboratory-treated T cells may kill more tumor cells. This Phase III trial is to assess if combined gemcitabine-carboplatin (GC) followed by adoptive T-cell therapy would improve clinical outcome for patients with advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). It is also the world's first, and largest, Phase 3 T-cell therapy cancer trial ever conducted, and enrollment is ongoing for 330 patients from 30 hospital centers across Asia and the United States. This clinical trial is conducted on the back of a successful Phase 2 NPC trial involving 38 patients at the National Cancer Centre, Singapore. This trial produced the best published 2-year (62.9%), and median overall survival (OS) data (29.9 months) in 35 patients with advanced NPC who received autologous EBV-specific CTL. Kindly see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3978790/ for the Phase 2 publication titled "Adoptive T-cell Transfer and Chemotherapy in the First line treatment of Metastatic and/or Locally Recurrent Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma".