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When the first anticancer therapies based on engineered T cells hit the market a few years ago, they offered the possibility of what would have once been perceived as a medical miracle: a one-shot cure for certain blood cancers. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies, as they are known, involve harnessing the patient’s own immune cells, genetically modifying them with cancer-specific receptors for maximum potency against cancerous cells, then reinjecting them into the patient. But for all that cancer-fighting ability, CAR T cells come at a cost: potentially severe side effects, massive price tags, and slow manufacture.
Now a new cell therapy for cancer is edging into the spotlight. Natural killer (NK) cells have potential as a cellular anticancer therapy that could be significantly safer, cheaper, and faster, researchers say.
So far, NK cell therapies haven’t shown any of the significant toxicities that ...
