UCSF CAR T tech doubles up on tumor specificity
A paper published online Thursday in Cell said University of California San Francisco researchers engineered chimeric antigen receptor T cells that show anti-tumor activity only against target cells that express two distinct tumor-associated antigens. The authors said the technology's specificity and modularity could expand the range of indications for CAR T cell therapies while protecting non-malignant cells that express single antigens.
The bispecific CAR T cells contain an engineered gene circuit encoding a synthetic Notch receptor, which an overlapping group of researchers described in a separate paper that was also published Thursday in Cell. In the T cell study, the synthetic receptor induces CAR expression only after binding an initial pre-specified tumor antigen. The CAR must then detect a second pre-specified tumor antigen to induce cytokine secretion or cytotoxicity. ...