Potential of Gene Therapy Using T Cells for Cancer Treatment

By: Caroline DePaul

DePaul, Caroline. Potential of Gene Therapy Using T Cells for Cancer Treatment. Rep. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

There is a new idea for adoptive therapy for treating cancer with the use of altering your T-Cells. T-Cells are your white blood cells and each T-Cell is shaped to target a specific antigen as an immune response. The idea of T-Cell Gene Therapy is to alter the shape of the cells to target tumor antigens as a way to kill cancer cells. Adding a chimeric antigen receptor to the T-Cells would make the T-cells attack tumor antigens. However, there are some risks to adoptive T-cell therapy such as, potential toxic effects when healthy tissues express the same target antigens as the tumor cell. When the T-cell has been altered and knows to target the cancerous cells the T-cells release perforin and cytotoxins, which both work to destroy the cell. The perforin and cytotoxins enter a newly created pore of the cell and completely killing the cell. Other helper T-cells do not target cells individually but they send out chemical messages to trigger certain immune cells to replicate or produce cytokines. There have been durable remissions after the use of T-cell therapy. T-cell engineering is looking very promising for treating blood cancers like leukemia.

I think that T-cell engineering could possible be very helpful, especially in treating blood cancers. T-cell engineering has been shown to be effective because it is using the cells that target viruses and just making them target a specific antigen to kill off all the tumor cells. Though there are some down sides to T-cell engineering I think that over time scientists will be able to find a specific helper T-cell that wont cause damage to healthy tissue. Overall, t-cell engineering is an incredible new alternative to chemotherapy and other treatments, which can be very taxing on the elderly especially because their bodies are weaker. Gene Therapy is very important to today’s society because all over the world people have cancer and there aren’t too many effective options for treatment because it is such a tough disease. Having another option to treat cancer is taking us one step closer to finding a cure.

I think the poster was very well done and presented in a well-explained manner. Caroline used a brilliant combination of diagrams and graphs to help me and the other viewers understand exactly how the T-cell engineering works. I think there could have been some more explanation of what exactly the T-cells function is. Also, some parts of the poster were very wordy and included a lot of confusing different types of T-cells without any explanation. The only thing the poster lacks is some explanatory detail in few places. Other than that I think that the poster and presentation was very well done. I hope to read and hear more about T-cell engineering and be updated on the results of the treatment. I found the learning about the potential gene therapy using T-cells very interesting and I cannot wait to read up about it again!