Blood cancer patients treated with Nexcar19 – ‘Made in India’ CAR-T cancer therapy, available at a tenth of the cost of Western treatments – responded quickly, with their cancer shrinking significantly, a new study shows.

Nearly half the patients in both the B-cell leukemia and lymphoma groups showed no worsening of their disease even a year later, helping them to live longer.

The study, published in Nature’s Blood Cancer Journal, also showed that NexCAR19 – developed by ImmunoACT (a spin-off from IIT Bombay) in collaboration with Tata Memorial Hospital – can in some cases deliver long-term cancer-free survival.

The findings from the first and largest real-world multicentre study of Talicabtagene autoleucel or NexCAR19, which is India’s first commercially approved CAR-T cell therapy for advanced blood cancers, confirmed that it offers an effective treatment option for certain blood cancers, particularly when other treatments haven’t worked or when the cancer has returned.

Speaking with this paper, Dr Atharv Karulkar, who is the co-founder and head of scientific programs at ImmunoACT and also the lead author of the study, said, “Real-world outcomes from 250 patients show NexCAR19 has efficacy comparable to globally approved CAR-T therapies.”

Nearly half the patients in both B-cell leukemia and lymphoma groups showed no worsening of their disease even a year later.

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The study, which evaluated 250 patients with difficult-to-treat B-cell cancers, across 56 treatment centers, including in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, between November 2023 and January 31, 2025, found that 88% of relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients saw their cancer significantly shrink or clear within 28 days of receiving the treatment, with 75% of the patients maintaining this response at three months.

Also, more than half of these leukaemia patients showed no cancer progression at the 12-month milestone, with nearly two-thirds remaining alive up to this point on receiving this breakthrough personalised immunotherapy.

Additionally, at 18 months, these patients who remained progression-free stayed in remission, with the longest remission observed extending to 27 months, demonstrating that the treatment benefits persist well beyond the initial response.

In patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, three-quarters responded to the therapy within 28 days, and nearly 60% maintained their response at three months.

This steady disease control meant 47% of all lymphoma patients reached the one-year mark without their cancer progressing with a 63% overall survival rate at 12 months.

Among these was a patient who travelled approximately 14,000 km to receive the therapy under the care of Dr. Kunal Goyal, Lead BMT & Cellular Therapy Physician at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, Navi Mumbai.

The patient had an aggressive form of B-cell lymphoma that had spread to the central nervous system (CNS) after an initial remission with chemotherapy, and had stopped responding to further treatment. In October 2024, the patient received NexCAR19, and tolerated the treatment well, with no major side effects, and scans by day 28 showed no detectable signs of cancer.

The patient has remained cancer-free since, for approximately two years now – an outcome that has helped doctors better understand how CAR-T therapy can be used to treat lymphoma that has spread to the brain and spine, a particularly difficult condition to treat.

Notably, none of the patients who responded to the treatment required a stem cell transplant to achieve these long-term outcomes, underscoring the durability of the therapy on its own.

The study found that the treatment led to shorter hospital stays (10-12 days). At the same time, fewer than 10% of patients required ICU-level care, indicating that the therapy can be adopted into routine clinical practice without placing a significant strain on hospitals.

“This is the first demonstration in India that a centralised CAR-T delivery model can make an advanced, complex cell therapy both accessible and effective at national scale – directly addressing a disease burden the country disproportionately carries,” Dr Karulkar told this paper.

“These findings position NexCAR19, India’s first indigenous CAR-T therapy, as a scalable and affordable model for global access, supporting its broader adoption in routine clinical practice,” he added.

Nearly half the patients in both B-cell leukemia and lymphoma groups showed no worsening of their disease even a year later.

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NexCAR19, which received accelerated market authorisation approval for use in relapsed or refractory B-cell malignancies in India in October 2023, costs less than ₹30 lakhs in India, making it the most affordable CAR-T therapy in the world, roughly one-tenth the price of such therapies globally, which exceed $350,000.

NexCAR19 has been administered to over 800 patients, including 60 international patients from 25 countries, against a current manufacturing capacity of an estimated 1,200 patients per year.

“The CAR-T therapy field is rapidly evolving, with growing research into its use in solid tumours, autoimmune diseases and other disease indications such as fibrosis, senescence-associated diseases, and infectious diseases,” Dr Karulkar added.

“More broadly, the real-world evidence has shown that NexCAR19 can be delivered across India at scale from a central coordinating unit while maintaining a manufacturing success rate as high as 98%,” he added.

CAR T-cell therapy trains a patient’s own immune cells to recognise and destroy cancer. It works by taking T cells – a type of white blood cell – from the patient’s blood and genetically modifying them in a lab to carry a special receptor.

Once returned to the patient’s body, these T cells use the receptor to identify and attch to cancer cells to kill them, helping to fight the disease.

In January 2026, Cipla allied with ImmunoACT to extend access to this life-saving therapy in Africa, making advanced cancer care accessible to patients worldwide.

India ranks third globally in reported blood cancer cases. Leukaemia and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, are the two most common types of blood cancers reported nationally.

An estimated 1.2 lakh blood cancer cases are annually reported in India, especially B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL) and Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL), which are aggressive forms of blood cancers

Globally, blood cancer cases are projected to reach 4.6 million cases by 2030.