New anti-cancer technology - CAR-ML NK cell therapy.

Wen . . . Li Yuan immunotherapy can improve the patient's immune system to attack cancer cells, cancer treatment, some of the most promising progress focused on this treatment.
but immunotherapy is not effective for all patients, researchers have been looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy.
in a new study published July 2 in the journal Blue, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine combined two strategies of immunotherapy, CAR (embedded antigen receptors) engineering and memory-like NK cells, into a new therapy, CAR-ML NK cell therapy.
In treating blood cancers such as leukemia, studies of human cells and mice have shown that the treatment is more effective than USR or memory-like NK cells alone, and that the new treatment may be safer than CAR-T.
: Blood researchers used CAR-T's T-cell modification technology to modify NK cells, resulting in immunotherapy that combines the benefits of CAR and NK and reduces occasional side effects of CAR-T cell therapy.
such as CAR-T cell therapy can cause cytokine storms in some patients, and this over-reaction of the immune system can be life-threatening.
. Todd A. Fehniger, author of the paper, said, "Immune therapy offers great hope in cancer treatment, but we need more effective and safer immunotherapy."
based on a treatment strategy developed for leukemia patients using NK cells, we established this binding method.
The combination increases the ability of NK cells to attack cancer cells, while also using the genetic engineering methods of CAR cell therapy to direct NK cells to tumor targets that are often overlooked, fundamentally changing the types of cancers that NK cells can treat, including other blood cancers and some solid tumors."
Team of Dr. Fehniger collected the patient's own NK cells in previous studies and exposed them to specific chemical signals that can trigger NK cells to attack tumors.
then injected these treated NK cells back into the patient for treatment.
results show that this chemical exposure allows NK cells to form memories when they are resistant to tumors, targeting tumor cells more effectively when they return to the body.
researchers call these cells memory-like NK cells.
in small clinical trials at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the University of Washington School of Medicine, memory-like NK cells continued to be effective in relieving some leukemia patients, but not in every patient, and some tumor cells were able to escape attack.
, the researchers modified memory-like NK cells with CAR molecules to help memory-like NK cells find and kill the correct tumor targets.
and the car molecular chemical structure has the flexibility to modify CAR according to the protein on the surface of cancer cells, thus directing memory-like NK cells to different types of tumors.
results showed that treating leukemia mice with car-memory-like (CAR-ML) NK cells was more effective than using memory-like NK cells alone, and that treated mice survived longer.
, the treatment worked despite the relatively low dose of cells given to mice.
CAR-ML NK cells showed an enhanced antigen-specific response to anti-tumor cell line (CD19) (Photo source: Blood) CAR-MLNK cells' in vitro increased response to primary lymphoma targets (Photo source: Blood) Lead author Dr. Melissa Berrien-Elliott believes that incredible tumor control at very small doses highlights the efficacy of these cells and their potential to expand in vivo.
Fehniger also noted that NK cells do not trigger dangerous immune responses or long-term side effects that T-cell therapy can cause when attacking a patient's healthy tissue - graft-versus-host disease.
cytokine release syndrome or neurotoxicity, which can be life-threatening side effects, have not been observed in all clinical trials of various types of NK cells.
, another benefit of this treatment is that it can be used by patients in the early stages of the disease rather than as a last resort.
although other research teams have developed CAR-NK cells, these NK cells come from donated cord blood or induced stem cells, not from adult donors or patients themselves.
is also the biggest difference from the therapies shown in this study.
"others artificially differentiate stem cells into NK-like cells, which does not guarantee that these differentiated cells have all the characteristics of a typical mature NK cell.
and our solution uses mature NK cells.
have shown that mature NK cells are effective in certain types of cancer patients, especially leukemia patients, and induced memory characteristics increase the durability and effectiveness of these cells for a variety of cancers.
next study, we hope to be able to produce enough cells for the first human clinical trial of CAR-ML NK cell therapy and to study their effectiveness in different types of human blood cancers.
," Dr. Fehniger added.
: 1 s Margery Gang et al. CAR-modified memory-like NK cells potent responses to NK-resistant lymphomas. Blood (2020).2?Two immunotherapies merged into, single more effective treatment that may work against the cancers (Source: Medical Press)