Abstract
The clinical success of chimeric antigen receptor-directed T cells in leukemia and lymphoma has boosted the interest in cellular therapy of cancer. It has been known for nearly half a century that a subset of lymphocytes called natural killer (NK) cells can recognize and kill cancer cells, but their clinical potential as therapeutics has not yet been fully explored. Progress in methods to expand and genetically modify human NK cells has resulted in technologies that allow the production of large numbers of highly potent cells with specific anticancer activity. Here, we describe clinically applicable protocols for NK cell engineering, including expansion of NK cells and genetic modification using electroporation of messenger RNA.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grant NMRC/STaR/0025/2015a from the National Medical Research Council of Singapore.
Conflict of Interest Statement: NS and DC are coinventors in patent applications describing some of the technologies used or related technologies. DC is scientific founder and stockholder of Nkarta Therapeutics, which holds the license for some of the technologies described.
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Shimasaki, N., Campana, D. (2020). Engineering of Natural Killer Cells for Clinical Application. In: Katz, S., Rabinovich, P. (eds) Cell Reprogramming for Immunotherapy. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2097. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0203-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0203-4_6
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