| Abstract | Since tumor-specific T cells were first utilized to treat melanoma patients in 1986, immune cell-based therapy for cancer treatment has been a topic of continuous immunological research and development, despite ups and downs in the broader interest in the subject. One popular form of cancer immunotherapy is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology, wherein an extracellular antigen-binding domain, usually composed of an antibody-derived single-chain variable fragment (scFv) domain, confers antigen-specific receptor activity. This extracellular targeting domain is synthetically recombined with intracellular signaling domains, which can be derived from many immune cell signaling molecules. CARs can then be delivered into immune cells (most commonly Natural Killer (NK) or T cells) using viral vectors or other gene delivery techniques, resulting in a living drug that can seek and destroy cancer cells. Following sensational results in clinical trials over the last decade, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has so far approved three CD19-targeted CAR therapies for patients with B-cell hematological malignancies, such as lymphoma and leukemia. This work has been followed more recently by many ongoing trials using various molecular strategies to target multiple antigens for the treatment of B-cell family cancers. There is also an increasing number of ongoing CAR-T clinical trials for other types of blood cancer and solid tumors, suggesting that more innovative CAR therapies will soon be available to patients who have had no other traditional options of treatment. This Special Issue is dedicated to highlighting current advances in chimeric antigen receptor technology and invites manuscripts that report strategies to overcome existing obstacles to wider development and clinical adoption of CAR therapies. Those include, but are not limited to, the challenges described below. |
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