Osaka – In recent decades monoclonal antibody-based treatment of cancer has been established as one of the most successful therapeutic strategies for both solid tumors and blood cancers. Monoclonal antibodies (mAb), as the name implies, are antibodies that are made by clonal cells derived from a single parent cells and therefore share the identical amino acid sequences.
One of the leading technologies to emerge in mAb-based treatment is CAR-T, where CAR stands for “chimeric antigen receptor”, and T represents T cells, a type of white blood cells that have pivotal roles in immune defenses. CARs are produced by combining together the gene for an antibody that recognizes a tumor antigen with the gene for a receptor that resides on the surface of the T cells; insert this new gene into a T cell and it will be precisely targeted at the tumor.
Theoretically, new antigens – molecules capable of inducing an immune response to produce an antibody – that arise from cancer-specific mutations of cell-surface proteins are excellent targets. However, mAb therapy targeting such antigens is impractical because of these proteins’ vast diversity within and between individual tumors, which renders identifying new cancer-specific target antigens difficult.
