Advances in CAR T Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors: Scopes and Limitations

The advent of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has marked the onset of a very promising option to treat solid tumors after its remarkable success in treating subsets of B cell leukemia and lymphoma. Recent developments in CAR T-cell therapy for solid tumors have been made possible by engineering CARs to overcome challenging limitations such as tumor heterogeneity, interfering immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME), and inadequate T-cell infiltration. Elegant experimental innovations incorporating multiple antigen targeting capacity in CARs has helped overcoming antigen escape phenomenon reprogramming the TME. Notwithstanding these innovative strategies, several problems still remain such as life-threatening CAR-T cell toxicities, off-target effects and the need for large-scale production of universally applicable CAR-T cells, along with the establishment of robust preclinical models for risk assessment.This Research Topic is intended to include research articles highlighting elegant experimental and engineering strategies to modify the receptor design having the potential to target multiple tumor-specific antigens to mitigate antigen escape and relapse phenomena. The recent introduction of tandem CARs and bispecific CARs along with CAR-T cells having the unique ability to target specific glycosylation patterns hold a lot of promise in solid tumors and more data needs to be analyzed. Perspectives and experimental evidence is also required to elucidate methods based on synthetic biology and genetic engineering for development of smart" CAR-T cells having the unique ability to become active and inactive (switch effect) to augment their persistence and potency in solid tumors. The issue also welcomes review articles on strategies to discuss TME modulation and reprogramming in CAR-T cell therapy via immune checkpoint molecules. We welcome Original Research, Review, Mini Review and Perspective articles on themes including, but not limited to:- Advances in CAR-T cell therapy: methodological improvements for solid tumors- CAR-T cell therapy outcome in different solid tumors: current data- Innovative strategies to prevent CAR-T cell toxicity and off-target effects- Tandem, Bispecific and Smart CAR-T cells in solid tumors Topic editors: Sheila Spada, Dr Anirban Ganguly Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/74885/advances-in-car-t-cell-therapy-for-solid-tumors-scopes-and-limitations