BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

CAR checkpoints

Why incorporating an anti-PD-1 mechanism into CAR T cells could treat solid tumors

August 4, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

The next big hurdle for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies is to extend their promise in blood cancers to solid tumors. The solution, according to a group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, could be to borrow from the branch of immunotherapy that has already proven itself in the clinic by engineering checkpoint inhibition into the CAR T cells.

In a study published last week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a group led by Prasad Adusumilli used a dominant-negative form of programmed cell death 1 (PD-1; PDCD1; CD279) to endow T cells with an built-in mechanism to block the signals that inhibit T cells' activation...