Entries by Thomas Gabrielczyk

CAR-NK Therapy: An Effective Strategy for Cancer Treatment

CAR-T therapies represent a new successful strategy for the treatment of hematological malignancies; however, recent studies have revealed some limitations, including the occurrence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), neurotoxicity, and cytokine release syndromes (CRS). This has prompted researchers to look for alternative, safer cells, such as natural killer (NK) cells 1. NK cells are lymphocytes that kill tumor cells and virus-infected cells non-specifically, without prior sensitization. CAR-NK therapy involves the modification of NK cells with mature chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology to exploit their unique target cell recognition mechanism and broad tumor-killing ability. Figure 1 illustrates the CAR-NK therapeutic strategy 1. Compared with CAR-T therapy, CAR-NK therapy has numerous advantages, such as lower GVHD and significantly reduced CRS toxicity and immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome toxicity, which enhance overall safety 2, 3. In addition, NK cells have multiple tumor recognition sites, thus potentially reducing antigenic escape failure 4.