Fact Check: FDA did not announce that ‘cancer treatment causes cancer’: Know the truth

Hyderabad: An Instagram post of a supposed fact-check article from an unnamed news outlet with the title ‘FDA admits cancer treatments cause cancer’ is being widely shared on social media.

Let’s see if the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) of the USA has made any such announcements.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is false.

Upon searching for news on the topic, we came across a public notice released by the FDA on November 28, 2023. In the notice, the FDA warned that the anti-cancer CAR-T treatment may cause other cancers.

The notice is titled ‘FDA Investigating Serious Risk of T-cell Malignancy Following BCMA-Directed or CD19-Directed Autologous Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell Immunotherapies.’

The notice reported that “‘The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received reports of T-cell malignancies, including chimeric antigen receptor CAR-positive lymphoma, in patients who received treatment with BCMA- or CD19-directed autologous CAR T cell immunotherapies. Reports were received from clinical trials and/or post-marketing adverse event (AE) data sources.”

We also found the information in an article on Reuters, which explains CAR-T therapy as, ‘the treatment generally involves extracting disease-fighting white blood cells known as T-cells from a patient, re-engineering them to attack cancer and infusing them back into the body. Since 2017, six CAR-T cell therapies have been approved by the FDA and all are for the treatment of blood cancers, including lymphomas and some forms of leukemia.’

However, the FDA hasn’t placed restrictions on CAR-T therapy, but the agency’s revelation left confusion in its wake. The FDA has said that there is a risk of developing malignancies in future but it does not say that the treatment will cause other types of cancers if CAR-T therapy is done. More research is needed to state a finding.