Development of Immune Cell Therapy Using T Cells Generated from Pluripotent Stem Cells

In the field of cancer immunotherapy, the effectiveness of a method in which patient-derived T cells are genetically modified ex vivo and administered to patients has been demonstrated. However, problems remain with this method, such as (1) time-consuming, (2) costly, and (3) difficult to guarantee the quality. To overcome these barriers, strategies to regenerate T cells using iPSC technology are being pursued by several groups in the last decade. The authors have been developing a method by which specific TCR genes are introduced into iPSCs and T cells are generated from those iPSCs (TCR-iPSC method). At present, our group is preparing this approach for clinical trial, where iPSCs provided from the iPSC project are transduced with WT1 antigen-specific TCR that had been already clinically tested, and killer T cells are generated from such TCR-iPSCs, to be administered to acute myeloid leukemia patients. While the adoptive T cell therapies have been mainly directed to be used in cancer immunotherapy, it is possible to apply these approaches to viral infections. Strategies by other groups to regenerate various types of T cells from iPSCs will also be introduced.