Chimeric Antigen Receptor Therapy, but Using Natural Killer Cells

Adding chimeric antigen receptors to T cells (CAR-T), causing them to aggressively target cancer cells, has proven to be a fruitful approach to the treatment of cancer. Like most immunotherapies, it can result in potentially severe side-effects related to excessive immune activation, but it is also quite effective. Treatment of forms of leukemia in particular has produced good results in a large fraction of patients who have trialed the therapy. In the research reported here, scientists extend the chimeric antigen receptor approach to natural killer cells rather than T cells, noting that this may prove to be both safer and logistically easier to deploy to large numbers of patients. Genetically engineered T cells that destroy cancer cells have proven to be promising options when other treatments fail. However, there's currently no one-size-fits-all CAR T, and each patient needs his own bespoke intervention. Now, researchers report that natural killer cells, grown from human induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells and modified in a similar way to CAR-T cells, are effective against ovarian cancer in a mouse model. The result paves the way for developing an "off the shelf" immunotherapy that doesn't need to be personalized for each patient. Natural killer (NK) cells, which play an important role in tumor surveillance, offer a key advantage over T cells in that they kill some cancer cells without requiring tumor-specific cell-surface receptors, meaning they can work in many ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs