title: TCR-engineered, customized, antitumor T cells for cancer immunotherapy: advantages and limitations.
abstract: The clinical outcome of the traditional adoptive cancer immunotherapy approaches involving the administration of donor-derived immune effectors, expanded ex vivo, has not met expectations. This could be attributed, in part, to the lack of sufficient high-avidity antitumor T-cell precursors in most cancer patients, poor immunogenicity of cancer cells, and the technological limitations to generate a sufficiently large number of tumor antigen-specific T cells. In addition, the host immune regulatory mechanisms and immune homeostasis mechanisms, such as activation-induced cell death (AICD), could further limit the clinical efficacy of the adoptively administered antitumor T cells. Since generation of a sufficiently large number of potent antitumor immune effectors for adoptive administration is critical for the clinical success of this approach, recent advances towards generating customized donor-specific antitumor-effector T cells by engrafting human peripheral blood-derived T cells with a tumor-associated antigen-specific transgenic T-cell receptor (TCR) are quite interesting. This manuscript provides a brief overview of the TCR engineering-based cancer immunotherapy approach, its advantages, and the current limitations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, USA. arvindac@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Arvind
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chhabra
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D016219:Immunotherapy, Adoptive / Q000379:methods*; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000628:therapy*; D011948:Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology* / Q000378:metabolism*; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology* / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D011948:Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell