Harnessing costimulatory domains for the structural design of transgenic T cell receptors to improve T cell-based immunotherapy

Abstract

The use of T cell based immunotherapy has been growing over the years and a number of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified T cell therapies have been approved for clinical use. These therapies have shown impressive results for hematological cancers. However, going from hematological cancers into solid tumors has been hard. Therefore, better designs should be tested to achieve effective anti-tumor responses against solid tumors. The major reason for the failure of T cell based immunotherapy to clear solid tumors is their immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). In this review many promising ongoing designs to better T cell based immunotherapy to overcome the obstacles posed by the TME and previous designed therapies will be brought forward. Both CAR and TCR based designs will be discussed. Each with the aim to achieve superior efficacy against hematological and solid tumors.