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CAR T Cell Therapy - An Overview
CAR T Cell Therapy - An Overview
In CAR T Cell Therapy, a patient’s blood is removed, and T cells are isolated from the blood sample. These T cells are then transfected with a vector encoding a Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) protein. The T cells which express the CAR are enriched and expanded, after which they are infused back into the patient’s bloodstream. These CAR T cells enable a faster and more effective immune response to kill cancer cells.
CAR T cell therapy is an example of an autologous immunotherapy. Some advantages of this therapy include:
- No Immunogenic response due to using the patient’s own cells
- Lasting “memory” immunity that can enable complete eradication of the cancer
- Greater specificity; fewer off-target effects and decreased toxicity
Mechanism of Action
Mechanism of Action
For each particular tumor antigen, a unique CAR receptor is designed such that the CAR will bind to the surface antigen. Upon binding to the surface antigen, the CAR T cell will be activated, triggering an immune response to kill the cancer cells.
Drawbacks of Traditional CAR T Cell Therapy
Drawbacks of Traditional CAR T Cell Therapy
One important limitation of current CAR T cell therapies is the necessity of designing an entire CAR construct for each different tumor every time, which makes the treatment extremely complicated, time-consuming and limits the applications of CAR T therapy. Other limitations also include the inaccurate targeting of tumor, and premature CAR activations, which means the traditional CAR T cell therapy can result in off-target toxicity and early T cell exhaustion in the body. Moreover, traditional CAR designs have only been successful in dealing with blood cancer, but have limited efficacy for solid tumors.
Overall, the design problem is that existing CAR T cells therapies cannot treat different tumors types without causing severe off-tumor toxicity, and the cells are often quickly exhausted in vivo, which results in limited treatment efficacy.
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