Genetic Engineering Publications - GEG Tech top picks

Pancreatic cancer is an incurable form of cancer and gene therapies are currently in clinical trials to treat this deadly disease. A comprehensive review of gene and cell biotherapies in development to combat pancreatic cancer is published in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy. The article, "Pancreatic Cancer Cell and Gene Biotherapies: Past, Present and Future," by corresponding author Pierre Cordelier of the University of Toulouse, and co-authors describes ongoing gene therapy clinical trials. In addition to gene therapies, the authors discuss vaccines, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, suicide genes and oncolytic viruses.

A boost for CAR–T cells

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)–T cell immunotherapy has been highly successful for treating certain blood cancers. Yet this approach has been a challenge for solid tumors, in part because it is difficult to target functional engineered T cells to the tumor site. Ma et al.designed a vaccine strategy to improve the efficacy of CAR–T cells by restimulating the CAR directly within the native lymph node microenvironment (see the Perspective by Singh and June). Injected “amph-ligand” vaccines promoted synthetic antigen presentation and led to CAR–T cell activation, expansion, and increased tumor killing. The system could potentially be applied to boost any CAR–T cell.