Genetic Engineering Publications - GEG Tech top picks

In the new study, Dr. Sykulev and colleagues in Takami Sato's lab engineered CAR-T cells to recognize an antigen on melanoma cells called high molecular weight melanoma-associated antigen (HMW-MAA). Melanoma cells express varying amounts of HMW-MAA on their cell surfaces. In their research, the researchers evaluated the extent to which CAR-T cells killed melanoma cells. They found that CAR-T cells effectively killed melanoma cells expressing high levels of HMW-MAA, but not those with lower levels of the antigen. The researchers then tested how well another type of immunotherapy, known as TCR-T cells that uses T cells engineered to express a specific T-cell receptor, killed the target cells. When the researchers treated melanoma cells with TCR-T cells, they found that the treatment readily killed tumor cells, even in melanoma cell lines that expressed far less HMW-MAA antigens than needed for CAR-T. The comparison thus revealed that TCR-T is superior to CAR-T therapy for melanoma.

In a paper now published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the authors describe how the cells showed enhanced "anti-tumor activity" in mice with ovarian cancer seeded from human cancer cells.

According to Jing Pan's article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology titled: Donor-derived CD7 chimeric antigen receptor T cells for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: first-in-human phase I trial, CAR T cells are reported to be remarkably effective in patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) but have not been successful to date in patients with T-cell ALL (T-ALL). Now, data from Pan and colleagues demonstrate the safety and impressive short-term efficacy of allogeneic donor-derived anti-CD7 CAR T cells in an early phase clinical trial involving patients with relapsed and/or refractory T-ALL.

A chimeric antigen receptor system that can integrate signals from multiple antigens
and fine-tune T cell activation in a cell-type-specific manner holds promise for enhancing
the safety and specificity of CAR T cell therapies for cancer treatment.