Abstract
Cancer is a deadly disease and affects everyone at any level of age. Many people lose hope once they are diagnosed with cancer. This is because there is no effective treatment for it. Till the end of the 19th century, researchers across the world were eager to design effective remedies for this decapitating phenomenon and designed so many interventions even though nothing is compensatory for a malignant tumor; in some cases, the side effects overwhelm the benefits. These interventions were surgery, irradiation, and chemotherapy like immune checkpoint inhibitors. The research in the early 20th century has come up with a very promising remedy for cancer at clinical trials and even some of which have been approved by various drug quality control agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is the Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR T-cell) Therapy. For this, T-cells are collected from the patient and genetically engineered, with the use of a viral vector, to express a CAR that is specific to an antigen expressed on a tumor cell. Then, the modified T-cells are expanded in the laboratory and re-infused into the patient to target and destroy all cells that express the tumor-associated antigen, to act as surveillance after it is fully transplanted. Its clinical trial attests a very good efficacy, safety, complete remission, and perdurability of the engineered CAR T-cells. However, there is still undiscovered knowledge regarding the full applications of CAR T-cell therapy especially for solid cancers, indicating the need for researchers’ efforts to end cancer globally.
Keywords
CAR T-cell therapy, Hybridoma, Immunotherapy, Intracellular co-stimulatory signals, mAb, MHC, Phage display library, TAAs, T-cell, TME, Tumor