Engineered TCR and CAR Cells for Immunotherapy of Solid Tumors

Dear Colleagues,

The Special Issue of Biomolecules is titled “Engineered TCR and CAR Cells for Immunotherapy of Solid Tumors”. The use of adoptive cell therapy strategies to treat cancer, including solid tumors, continues to be a rapidly evolving therapeutic paradigm. The successful clinical application of engineered T cell receptor (TCR) or chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to treat B cell malignancies, such as leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, has quickly transformed modern medicine. These concepts have been expanded to include additional immune cell sources, such as natural killer (NK) cells, dendritic cells (DC), and macrophages.

Beyond introduction of synthetic receptors to increase immune cell recognition and elimination of cancer cells, genomic engineering approaches to enhance anti-cancer activity of immune cells are also widely explored. For example, genetic interruption of the TCR to avoid graft-versus-host-disease (GvHD) in allogeneic T cell therapy settings, ablation of molecules critical for immune checkpoint signaling to reduce the ability of tumor cells to silence the cytotoxic capacities of modified immune cells, or knockout of target antigens that are also expressed on the modified immune cells to avoid fratricide.

New insights into critical aspects such as the best method to generate TCR- or CAR-modified immune cells, advantages of different immune cell types and sources that can be used, determination of the most useful application modalities (e.g. mono-therapy, bridge-to-transplant, in combination with surgery and/or chemotherapy and radiation therapy) and challenges (e.g. tumor heterogeneity, immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment) presented by solid tumors that need to be overcome to increase anti-cancer efficacy are highly welcome.

This Special Issue will highlight current and emerging concepts and strategies to target and eliminate solid tumors using engineered immune cells, including recent progress in preclinical and clinical studies that may direct development of more efficacious therapeutic strategies. The journal Biomolecules encourages clinicians and researchers to submit their original research or reviews on use of modified immune cells to treat solid tumors for consideration of publication in this Special Issue.

Dr. Michael Morgan
Dr. Vinagolu K. Rajasekhar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biomolecules is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• solid tumors
• chimeric antigen receptors (CAR)
• TCR
• genome editing/base editing
• tumor targeting
• tumor heterogeneity
• tumor microenvironment
• immunotherapies
• TRUCKs