Since 2017, a personalized immunotherapy called Chimeric Antigen Receptor, or CAR-T cell treatment, has worked wonders to treat patients with blood cancers such as leukemia.
But when it comes to treating solid tumor cancers, such as lung, breast and kidney cancers that make up the bulk of these malignancies, this type of immune cell therapy has fallen short.
“There is a major push now to understand how to make CAR-T cells efficacious in solid tumors,” said Stephen Hatfield, assistant professor in pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. “Right now, clinically, this approach has not been successful.”
A major obstacle is the low oxygen environment of solid tumors, which generates molecules that essentially turn off the cancer-fighting ability of specially engineered CAR T-cells, Hatfield said.
But he has collaborated with colleagues to overcome this critical barrier by using a type of genetic engineering known as base editing – a precise gene-editing technique that makes targeted changes to molecular DNA.
