Scientists have developed a new type of cancer therapy, CAR-haNKs cell therapy.

In a recent study published in the international journal eLife, scientists from the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the United States engineered natural killer immune cells to not only kill head and neck cancer tumor cells in mouse organisms, but also reduce levels of immunosuppressive myelin cells, which promote the immune response of tumors to avoid host bodies.
this engineered cell therapy can be used as an alternative treatment for cancer patients who have previously failed with immunotherapy (based on T-cell activation), and in recent years, new therapies called T-cell therapy or CAR-T cell therapy have been used by clinicians to treat a variety of cancer patients, including blood cancer, however, these T-cell therapies rely on the patient's own T-cell reprogramming expression of inthne antigen receptors (CAR) to attack tumor cells, and the patient's ability to program their own T-cell process is very expensive.
highly affinitized natural killer cells (haNKs) represent a potential "off-the-shelf" cell therapy that does not rely on reprogramming of the patient's autoimmune cells, which can be produced in large quantities and available to any patient required for treatment, while the presence of immunosuppressive myelin cells in the tumor microenvironment remains an obstacle to effective immunotherapy, including NK-based therapy.
to address this problem, in this study, researchers used haNKs, which express CAR, to target the action of the procedural death factor ligand 1 (PD-L1, programd die ligand 1), a factor in the mass production of cancer cells and immunosuppressive myelin cells, and is also responsible for suppressing the immune system function of the host body.
researcher Clint Allen said: 'We tested the effect of engineered PD-L1 haNKs and common haNKs on resistance to head and neck cancer cells in humans and mice, and found that the expression of PD-L1 CAR was compared to haNKs cells without CAR. HaNKs cells can effectively kill tumor cells in mice and human bodies, and even if they have been exposed to PD-L1 cells before, this ability can be preserved, which is important because natural killer cells are thought to be depleted after killing target cells.
in the mouse body of head and neck cancer, haNK cell-based therapy can cure about 30% of mice, but also can slow the growth of tumors in other mice without any toxic effect;
to investigate whether this effect on immune cells will occur in the patient's body, the researchers gave white blood cells from the body of high-level head and neck cancer patients carrying PD-L1 haNK cells, as observed in mice, when treated with PD-L1 haNK cells, the level of immunosuppressive myelin cells carrying PD-L1 decreased significantly, suggesting that the therapy can not only directly kill the tumor and suppress the immune cell.
the results of this paper, the expression of PD-L1 CAR haNK cells may overcome some of the limitations of conventional immunotherapy that relies on T-cell activation, and can also be used to treat patients who fail or are not sensitive to therapy using existing immunotherapy, the next step researchers will apply this therapy to clinical trials to observe the safety and efficiency of PD-L1 haNks in the treatment of high-level or recurrent cancer patients, while the researchers hope to clarify whether the effectiveness of the treatment of other high-level or recurrent cancer.
original origins: Yvette Robbins, Sarah Greene, Jay Friedman, et al. control Tumor via targeting PD-L1 with chimeric antigen ratting NK cells, eLife (2020). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.54854 Source from Bio Valley, for more information download biovalley APP (