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

Immunotherapy improves a patient's immune system's ability to attack cancer cells, and some of the most promising advances in cancer treatment have focused on the treatment.
but immunotherapy is not effective for all patients, and researchers have been looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy.
July 2nd, in a new study published in the journal Blod, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine combined two strategies of immunotherapy, CAR (embedded antigen subjects), with memery-like NK cells into a new therapy, CAR-ML NK cell therapy.
In treating blood cancers such as leukemia, studies in human cells and mice have shown that the treatment is more effective than using CAR or memory-like NK cells alone, and that the new treatment may be safer than CAR-T therapy.
photo source: 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 in CAR-T cell therapy.
such as CAR-T cell therapy can cause cytokine storms in some patients, and this overreaction by the immune system can be life-threatening.
. Todd A. Fehniger, author of the paper, said: "Immunotherapy offers great hope for cancer treatment, but we need more effective and safer immunotherapy.
based on the treatment strategies developed for leukemia patients using NK cells, we have established this combination.
This combination enhances the ability of NK cells to attack cancer cells, and can also use the genetic engineering 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.
" Dr. Fehniger team collected the patient's own NK cells in a previous study and exposed them to specific chemical signal formulations that trigger NK cells to attack tumors.
then the researchers injected the treated NK cells back into the patient for treatment.
results show that this chemical exposure enables NK cells to form memories when fighting tumors, and when they return to the body, they target tumor cells more effectively.
researchers call these cells memory-like NK cells.
In small clinical trials conducted at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the University of Washington School of Medicine, memory-like NK cells were able to continuously and effectively alleviate the condition in some leukemia patients, but not for 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 flexibility of the CAR molecular chemical structure, CAR can be modified according to the proteins on the surface of cancer cells, thus directing memory-like NK cells to different types of tumors.
results showed that treating leukemia mice with this CAR-memory sample (CAR-ML) NK cell was more effective than using memory-like NK cells alone, and that treated mice survived longer.
, the treatment was effective despite a relatively low dose of cells given to mice.
CAR-ML NK cells show enhanced anti-tumor cell line antigen (CD19) specific response (Photo: Blood) CAR-MLNK cells' increased response to primary lymphoma targets in vitro (Photo source: Blood) Lead author Dr. Melissa Berrien-Elliott believes that the incredible amount of tumor control that can be seen at very small doses highlights the efficacy of these cells and their potential for in vivo amplification, which is critical to translating these findings into clinical.
Fehniger also points out that NK cells do not trigger a dangerous immune response, nor do they cause long-term side effects that T-cell therapy can cause when attacking a patient's healthy tissue : graft-versus-host disease.
and in all clinical trials of various NK cells, no life-threatening side effects such as cytokine release syndrome or neurotoxicity have been observed.
addition, 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 umbilical cord blood or induced stem cells, not from adult donors or the patients themselves.
is also the biggest difference from the therapies shown in this study.
"others artificially differentiate stem cells into NK-like cells, a method that does not guarantee that these differentiated cells have all the characteristics of a typical mature NK cell."
and our solution uses mature NK cells.
studies have shown that mature NK cells are effective in certain types of cancer patients, especially leukemia patients, and induced memory properties increase the durability and effectiveness of these cells for a variety of cancers.
in the 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.
reference: 1 s Margery Gang et al. CAR-modified memory-like NK cells exhibit potent responses to NK-resistant lymphomas. Blood (2020). 2 s two immunotherapies merged into single, more effective treatment that may work against variety of cancers (Source: Medical press)