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Mode of action of T cells engineered with CAR or TCR for cancer treatment

Published on June 30, 2026   48 min

A selection of talks on Cancer

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0:00
Hi. My name is Sebastian Kobold. I'm a professor of medicine and experimental immuno-oncology and vice chair of clinical pharmacology here at the university hospitals of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Today, I want to tell you more about how T cells that have been engineered either with a chimeric antigen receptor or with a T cell receptor work for cancer treatment. I would just go straight ahead with saying that most of the talk will be about chimeric antigen receptors, CAR, because they're the so far only approved treatment or cellular treatment for cancer that we have. That's why I think it's much more important to focus on those than on the TCRs which are currently more experimental.
0:48
T-cells are really at the core of therapeutic developments in oncology. The reason for that is has really been because it has been recognized that T-cells are being hampered, are being suppressed by cancer cells in order to give the cancer cells the opportunity to grow and to progress. Meaning that in a sense, T-cells have the natural ability to become specific against specific or cancer-associated antigens. But the issue is that T-cells are being suppressed by the tumor cell to allow the tumor cell freedom to grow and to metastasize. But it has been recognized that in this sense, two molecules seem to be very important to suppress T-cell activity in cancer, which is the Programmed Death Receptor 1 and the Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte Antigen 4, CTLA-4. One of the big parts of the advances in oncology in the recent years has been that if you block either of those pathways by, let's say monoclonal antibodies, as depicted on the slide, you can actually reinvigorate T-cell responses and enable them to recognize cancer cells again. This has really been a paradigm shift in oncology, because now, for the first time, we really had a drug or a modality that is not targeting the cancer cell at all, but targeting only immune cells or T-cells in this case. By doing so, they re-enable the immune system to recognize cancer cells and to be therapeutic. So in a sense, T-cells have become premium or prime anticancer weapons. At the core of this recognition stems the following idea.

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Mode of action of T cells engineered with CAR or TCR for cancer treatment

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