Targeting the Cancer Specific Sites with Novel Light Activated CAR-T Cell Immunotherapy

Release Date: 30-Jul-2020

In recent years, CAR-T immunotherapy has been recognized as one of the most promising therapy for the cancer treatment. Although the treatment is providing high class treatment facility for the cancer patients but continuous research regarding the advancement is going actively to deliver century’s most desirable cancer therapy. This has resulted in a novel CAR-T cell immunotherapy that utilizes light energy to activate the immune cells at the site of cancer.

There are some of the disavantages that are associated with the use of CAR-T cell therapy but this has now been tackled as the novel CAR-T cell therapy focuses on delivering its actions by using blue light. The blue light in the respective therapy is considered as a controllable “on” switch that comes into action when it targets the cancer cells specifically, causing no disturbaances to the healthy neighbouring tissue. The whole novel concept of CAR-T cell therapy is termed as light-inducible nuclear translocation and dimerization system.

The mechanism of action of the light induced CAR-T cell was observed in the patient having lymphoma. It was found that the stimulation of the CAR-T cells with light killed the lymphoma cancer cells and after a certain periof of time (12hrs), the light induced CAR-T cells were more effective than they were observed before. When tested on the mouse models, the cells were able to significantly reduce the tumor growth by showing their cytotoxicity against the tumor cells.

Several different studies on different model organisms were performed by the researchers for verifying the effect of light-induced CAR-T cells on the tumor cells and all represented a data that could be used to take the process to the next step. It was noted that the light stimulations used for the activation of the CAR-T cells at the target site can be observed as the next biggest breakthrough as it has the ability to show strong cytotoxicity against the cancer cells when compared to the other commercially available cancer therapies.