Therapeutic potential of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in engineered T-cell therapy

Abstract

Cancer patients have been treated with various types of therapies, including conventional strategies like chemo-, radio-, and targeted therapy, as well as immunotherapy like checkpoint inhibitors, vaccine and cell therapy etc. Among the therapeutic alternatives, T-cell therapy like CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor Engineered T cell) and TCR-T (T Cell Receptor Engineered T cell), has emerged as the most promising therapeutics due to its impressive clinical efficacy. However, there are many challenges and obstacles, such as immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, manufacturing complexity, and poor infiltration of engrafted cells, etc still, need to be overcome for further treatment with different forms of cancer. Recently, the antitumor activities of CAR-T and TCR-T cells have shown great improvement with the utilization of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology. Thus, the genome editing system could be a powerful genetic tool to use for manipulating T cells and enhancing the efficacy of cell immunotherapy. This review focuses on pros and cons of various gene delivery methods, challenges, and safety issues of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing application in T-cell-based immunotherapy.

Keywords: CRISPR; gene editing; immunotherapy.