Nature: A new type of CAR-T cells that can target cancer driver factors that could not be targeted before

Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have made a breakthrough in the treatment of aggressive solid cancers.

This discovery, published in the journal Nature, opens the door to the use of immunotherapy to treat a wider range of cancers and the application of each therapy to a larger proportion of the population

"This research is very exciting because it improves the possibility of targeting very specific tumor molecules, expanding the cancers that can be treated with immunotherapy and the patient population that can benefit," a researcher and paper in the Maris Laboratory at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia First author Dr.

The development of CAR-T cell-based cancer immunotherapy marks a breakthrough in the treatment of leukemia, but this approach has not yet made significant progress in the treatment of solid tumors, at least in part due to the lack of tumor-specific targets

Neuroblastoma is an aggressive, aggressive childhood cancer that is driven by changes in gene expression and promotes uncontrolled tumor growth

Despite these obstacles, the researchers hypothesized that some peptides on the surface of neuroblastoma cells are derived from proteins that are essential for tumor growth and survival and can be targeted by synthetic CARs

To this end, researchers isolated MHC molecules from neuroblastoma cells and determined which peptides were present and in what abundance

Using this multi-omics method, the researchers identified an unmutated neuroblastoma peptide from PHOX2B, which is a neuroblastoma-dependent gene and transcription regulator that has been previously identified and described in CHOP

In further research, the research team tested PC-CARs on mice and found that this treatment can completely and targetedly eliminate neuroblastoma

"We are excited about this work because it allows us to now track basic cancer drivers that were considered'unavailable drugs' in the past

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Yarmarkovich et al.