A recent study published in Nature Immunology demostrates that durable asthma remission can be achieved with engineered and long-lived chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell treatment in mice. Study: A single infusion of engineered long-lived and multifunctional T cells confers durable remission of asthma in mice . Image Credit: Nemes Laszlo / Shutterstock.
com Cell therapies can lead to durable remission of some cancers with a single infusion, which is comparable to protein- or small molecule-based therapies that require repeated or chronic administration. CAR T-cell therapy, for example, has cured patients with B-cell malignancies. This has led researchers to become increasingly interested in determining whether T-cells could be engineered for long-term remission of non-cancerous diseases as well.
Nearly 50% of patients with asthma exhibit the type-2 high signature, which is characterized by eosinophilia, immunoglobulin E (IgE) production, bronchial hyperresponsiveness, and mucus hypersecretion. Although biologic agents targeting interleukin-4 (IL-4), IL-5, and IL-13 have been approved for asthma, these require lifelong administration and are not cost-effective or curative. Furthermore, there remains a lack of treatments available for asthma that can confer durable remission with a single dose/infusion.
A CAR was initially developed with mouse IL-5 as the antigen-binding moiety. T-cells expressing this IL-5 CAR, which were eventually referred to as 5T cells, were found to ef.