BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Putting on the brakes

January 16, 2014 8:00 AM UTC

The key safety concern with chimeric antigen receptors is their inability to distinguish whether healthy or malignant cells are expressing a target antigen. A group at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center thinks it has solved the problem with T cells expressing two antigen-specific receptors to distinguish on-target cancer cells from off-target normal cells.1

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells currently in the clinic are made up of an antigen-specific single-chain variable fragment (scFv) fused to T cell-activating and -co-stimulatory domains. The CAR is designed to bind to an extracellular, tumor-associated antigen, and the stimulatory domains cause T cells to activate and proliferate, thus eliminating tumor cells...