CAR NK Cell Therapy Directed Against Pancreatic Cancer
Using donated umbilical cord blood, researchers from City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles created an off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cell therapy that prolonged life with minimal side effects in a mouse model of metastatic human pancreatic cancer. The novel therapy, which targets prostate stem cell antigen (PSCA)—expressed in 60-80 percent of all human pancreatic cancers and associated with poor prognosis—is expected to move into clinical trials at City of Hope within the next 12 months, the researchers said. “We introduced a manufactured platform that can generate billions of CAR-NK cells from a single cord unit, a freezing process that preserved the potency of the product and substantial in vivo efficacy of the PSCA CAR-NK cells in an animal model of metastatic pancreatic cancer, ” said Kun-Yu Teng, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Michael A. Caligiuri with the City of Hope, who presented findings during Week 1 of the virtual annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), held April 10-15, 2021 (Abstract LB154).