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Review
. 2022 Mar 9;14(6):1403.
doi: 10.3390/cancers14061403.

Emerging Novel Combined CAR-T Cell Therapies

Anh Nguyen  1 , Gary Johanning  2 , Yihui Shi  3
Affiliations
Review

Emerging Novel Combined CAR-T Cell Therapies

Anh Nguyen et al. Cancers (Basel). .

Abstract

Chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) T cells are T cells engineered to express membrane receptors with high specificity to recognize specific target antigens presented by cancer cells and are co-stimulated with intracellular signals to increase the T cell response. CAR-T cell therapy is emerging as a novel therapeutic approach to improve T cell specificity that will lead to advances in precision medicine. CAR-T cells have had impressive outcomes in hematological malignancies. However, there continue to be significant limitations of these therapeutic responses in targeting solid malignancies such as heterogeneous antigens in solid tumors, tumor immunosuppressive microenvironment, risk of on-target/off-tumor, infiltrating CAR-T cells, immunosuppressive checkpoint molecules, and cytokines. This review paper summarizes recent approaches and innovations through combination therapies of CAR-T cells and other immunotherapy or small molecule drugs to counter the above disadvantages to potentiate the activity of CAR-T cells.

Keywords: T cell; checkpoint inhibitor; chimeric antigen receptor (CAR); combined therapy; hematologic malignancies; immunotherapy; solid tumor; target antigen; tumor-associated antigen (TAA); tumor-specific antigen (TSA).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The general structure of different CAR generations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Various CAR constructs aimed at overcoming the loss of antigen and tumor heterogeneity.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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