Cytokine release syndrome (CRS) is a pathological condition, triggered by a massive production of pro-inflammatory cytokines -often referred to as “cytokine storm”- associated to many infectious and non-infectious conditions. Its clinical features include fever, vascular leakage, hypotension and, in some individuals even neurotoxicity and death.
CRS can also be associated to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-expressing T cell-based therapies, often used in patients with blood malignancies and, as a matter of fact, it represents one of the major obstacles to broader uses of this terapeutic approach. This month, Lucy Bird, of Nature Reviews Immunology, highlighted two papers that investigated the molecular mechanisms of CRS in mouse models. Avoiding the cytokine storm and its deleterious effects might be an important achievement in order to extend the therapeutic use of CAR-expressing T cell transfer to other pathologies.