When Stem Cells Takes a CAR: Future of Tumor Treatment

Posted by Candy Swift on January 27th, 2021

In recent years, immune cells derived from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have become a hot spot in the field of regenerative medicine research. Immune cells derived from pluripotent stem cells include natural killer cells, macrophages and lymphoid cells, especially T cells, which are often used as immune cell therapy to treat difficult-to-treat cancers.

What are pluripotent stem cells?

Stem cells are precursor cells. In simple terms, they are a kind of primitive undifferentiated cells with multi-differentiation potential and self-replication ability. They are primitive cells in various tissues and organs of mammals. According to the differentiation potential, they can be divided into totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells and multipotent stem cells.

Pluripotent stem cells are different from other types with their unique ability to differentiate into more than 200 somatic cell types of mature mammalian organisms, for which they are considered to have infinite self-renewal capacity if maintained under optimal growth conditions in vitro, and normally grow at a faster rate than other stem or somatic cell types.

What are the advantages of pluripotent stem cells?

1. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are similar to embryonic stem cells, which have strong differentiation and regeneration ability and can differentiate into various cell types required by various organs and tissues of the human body.

2. Pluripotent stem cells are a kind of stem cells derived through genetic editing, so there are no social ethical issues in terms of the source.

3. They can also generate syngeneic control cell lines through CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. This gene editing can change DNA to achieve the goal of using cells to treat human diseases.

Combination of CAR technology and pluripotent stem cells

Due to the emergence of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology, the clinical use of CAR-T cells has successfully stimulated its new therapeutic potential. Therefore, in the future, it’s expected to use CAR technology and pluripotent stem cells to generate CAR engineered immune cells.

In April 2019, in an article published in International Journal of Molecular Sciences, scientists outlined the pluripotent stem cell-derived immune cells and CAR technology, and combined the two approach together, providing new ideas and ways for the development of a new generation of immune cell therapy.

Immune cell therapy is a new type of therapy, which is expected to treat cancer types that are difficult to treat with conventional therapies. Now scientists have developed a variety of immune cell therapies. In addition to developing immune cells that can be used as therapy, making immune cells more safe and efficient for clinical applications, researchers are now beginning to use CRISPR and CAR technology to modify immune cells. CRISPR/Cas9 tools can provide simple methods to generate a variety of genetic modifications, and CAR technology can enable immune cells to detect tumor-specific antigens, and also enable immune cells to be activated after binding to their homologous antigens.

With the development of CRISPR/Cas9 technology and the fourth-generation CAR technology, CAR immune cells derived from CRISPR-modified human pluripotent stem cells are expected to fight against some difficult-to-treat cancers. With the deepening of research, it is also expected to develop a new generation of immune cells to solve the limitations of current therapies by improving a variety of factors, including availability, potential, cost-effectiveness, and anti-tumor activity.