Beyond CAR T Cells: Other Cell-Based Immunotherapeutic Strategies Against Cancer

Conclusions: CAR T cell therapies have demonstrated the clinical benefits of harnessing our body's own defenses to combat tumor cells. Similar research is being conducted on lesser known modifications and gene-modified immune cells, which we highlight in this review. Introduction Chimeric antigen receptors and engineered T cell receptors (based on previously identified high affinity T cell receptors) function by redirecting T cells to a predefined tumor-specific (or tumor-associated) target. Most of these modifications use retroviral or lentiviral vectors to integrate the construct, and most of the receptors feature a costimulatory signal—enhancing T cell activation following recognition of the target antigen. These modified T cells have collectively shown promising success rates, particularly against hematologic malignancies (1), with growing excitement for these novel treatments (2). Pioneering work at the NIH resulted in promising therapies for melanoma (3) and synovial sarcoma (4). Some of these therapies have been approved as licensed drugs. CAR T cells targeting commonly overexpressed leukemia and lymphoma markers such as CD19 have shown promise in the prevention and treatment of malignancies such as Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL), Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), Diffuse Large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL), and other B cell malignancies (5–8). These CD19-CAR Phase I and II trials have demonstrated sa...
Source: Frontiers in Oncology - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research