CAR T-cells: hot news in cancer therapy

Cancer immunotherapy has become a standard therapeutic option in oncology over the past few decades. From the early anti-tumor vaccine experiments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its journey led through the discovery of the allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation principles in the nineteen-seventies, introduction of monoclonal antibodies in the nineteen-nineties, their enhancing in the form of immunoconjugates and bispecific antibody constructs, up to todays checkpoint inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR T-cells). Not so long ago, a treatment with genetically modified lymphocytes may have seemed quite like science fiction, but nowadays, these “living drugs“ are already being administered to patients with hematological malignancies in the Czech Republic. Some may see CAR T-cells as a breakthrough treatment method and bright future of oncology, others perhaps just as an overhyped sensation, in which the cost far exceeds the efficacy. Either way, CAR T-cells will soon become a relatively routine treatment option for patients with resistant lymphoproliferative diseases. Our article aims to introduce this new interesting method to specialists outside the fields of hematology and oncology.