Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy for breast cancer

One of the main reasons that researchers pay enormous attention to immunotherapy is that, despite significant advances in conventional therapy approaches, breast cancer remains the leading cause of death from malignant tumors among women. Genetically modifying T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) is one of the novel methods that has exhibited encouraging activity with relative safety, further urging investigators to develop several CAR T cells to target overexpressed antigens in breast tumors. This article is aimed not only to present such CAR T cells and discuss their remarkable results but also indicates their shortcomings with the hope of achieving possible strategies for improving therapeutic response.Lay abstract Breast cancer is the most dangerous and fatal malignancy among women worldwide. This disease has a heterogeneous behavior, that is, it can present different characteristics in various penitents. Consequently, treatments such as chemotherapies could not have the same satisfactory outcomes in all patients. The researchers are putting a huge amount of effort to discover treatments in a more specialized way for each individual. Cancer cells express specific antigens not present in normal cells, and this characteristic could be used to specialize breast cancer treatment. This feature is used in a novel method termed immunotherapy, through which human body immune cells are genetically engineered and enhanced in function to target the antigen-expressing cancer cells. CAR T-cell therapy is a new strategy in immunotherapy that harnesses the aforementioned technique. The results of such treatments were unprecedented in laboratory experiments; however, to use this method widely in humans, further investigation is necessary. In this review, comprehensive information about the CAR T-cell therapy as well as its laboratory and clinical results are discussed.