The Cellular Immunotherapy Revolution: Arming the Immune System for Precision Therapy

Immunotherapy treatments harnessing the patient's immune system herald a new era of personalized medicine, offering hope for curative responses in patients with serious illnesses. Cell-mediated immunity can eliminate cancer cells and provide durable remissions. This often relies on repurposing cytotoxic T cell activity through modified T cell receptors or chimeric antigen receptors. Furthermore, synthetic biology has expanded the cell engineering toolkit to provide immune cells with more functionality, including disease targeting, potency, and safety. We focus on T cell-based immunotherapy, highlighting discoveries of genetic engineering and therapeutic use. We also examine emerging paths that could be undertaken to improve this novel class of drugs, and discuss the challenges of toxicities as well as other limitations of cellular immunotherapy.