Team:Freiburg/Description


Logo
Overview Motivation CAR T Cells Tumor Microenvironment AND Gate Outlook Achievements References
Members Attributions Partners Contact
Main Project Modeling Applied Design Proof of Concept BioBricks Basic Part BioBrick Improvement Interlab Study
Safety Cloning HIF1A Knockdown Cell Culture Lab Book
Human Practice Integrated Human Practice Collaborations

Description


The treatment and understanding of cancer is a challenging issue. New approaches like the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells showed promising results in fighting cancer by enhancing the killing effects of cytotoxic T-cells. The main benefit of CAR T-cells is their high affinity to tumor antigens, however this raises the issue of possible off-target effects since tumor antigens are not solely expressed on tumor cells but also on healthy tissues (Fesnak et al. 2016; Morgan et al. 2010).

In order to avoid off-target effects, we aim to establish CAR T-cell lines which are only activated in the specific tumor microenvironment (Hanahan, Coussens 2012). The T-cells are modified to express CAR controlled by a genetic AND-gate system which needs two inputs from the tumor microenvironment to be activated. This would allow a highly localization restricted binding of cytotoxic T-cells to tumor cells and provide safer cancer cell-based immunotherapy.