• CAR T cell therapy, which uses engineered T cells to target cancer cells, has been effective in some blood cancers but not so much in solid-tumor cancers like pancreatic and prostate cancer.
• Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that deleting the gene for CD5, a protein found on the surface of T cells, can greatly enhance CAR T cell therapy’s effectiveness against various cancers.
• CD5 acts as an immune checkpoint, limiting T cell function, but removing it through CRISPR-Cas9 technology has shown to significantly improve CAR T cell anti-cancer activity in preclinical studies.
• This CD5 deletion strategy has been successful in enhancing the effectiveness of CAR T cells in both liquid and solid cancers, including T-cell malignancies, B-cell leukemia, lymphoma, pancreatic cancer, and prostate cancer.
• A Phase I clinical trial of CD5-knockout CAR T cells is set to begin for patients with CD5-bearing T-cell lymphomas, with the hope of expanding this approach to a wider range of cancers in the future.
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Oncology, Immunology, CRISPR.