Abstract

A doptive cell transfer (ACT), which utilizes genetically-modified T cells for cancer immunotherapy, has been successfully applied for the treatment of a number of hematologic B-cell malignancies. This technique, also known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, has proven less successful against those cancers having solid tumors. A number of factors contribute to this technique's poor applicability in a solid tumor setting, including modest immunogenicity of tumor-associated antigens (TAAs), poor expansion of genetically-modified T cells, heterogeneity of the TAAs within a genetically-diverse solid tumor, impaired migration of the modified T cells to within the body of the tumor, and immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment (TME).